Oh, fuck. What a day.
My boss, whom I’ve mentioned on here more than once as a shining exemplar of everything a boss ought to be and a totally great person all around, has been in the hospital for about six weeks. Originally they thought it was a bad reaction to some meds, then they thought it was the flu, and back and forth. After a week they put him in the ICU with a breathing tube, and after a month he was finally diagnosed with an extremely rare form of cancer.
At 10 a.m. this morning I got the call to tell me he’d died. He never left the ICU.
Jimmy taught me pretty much everything I know about journalism. He jumped in and worked his ass off alongside all of us during the Sept. 11 attacks, the shuttle disaster, the horrible windstorm last summer that crippled the city, and a zillion other events big and small. He was always, unfailingly cheerful and enthusiastic; every day when I came in I heard “Greetings!” and when I asked him how he was doing he’d say “Doing well!”
So I’m sitting around the house trying to come to grips with the fact that I’ll never see him again. I hear the mailman drop off the mail, and I go out to see what it is.
It’s a letter informing me that I’ve got a full scholarship to law school this fall.
This is not how karma is supposed to fucking work.
