Forty Easters ago, I woke up on foreign soil with a blurred vision that scared the daylights out of me. I was twenty years old at the time, a young woman studying abroad, searching for self amid the seductive Athenian ruins of Greece. I had flown from Paris to Athens on a whim that April – it was the closest place imaginable to experience the sights, sounds and aromas of home. Distanced from California and family, I yearned for a taste of my former life – shish kebab, paklava, all the delicious foods and ethnic rhythms encompassing my Armenian culture and symbolic of home.

What I want you to know is that one tiny crack beneath our feet took us both to the ground.

The news came out of nowhere. Fantasizing he was the kind of man who might defy the odds, I had imagined him living forever, personifying Saroyan’s famed words, “Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case.” I wanted him to be the exception. The unexpected sight of his name in a Fresno Bee headline – cradled between the front page and A7 caused a sip of early morning coffee to spill uncontrollably from my mouth, nearly drowning the story announcing his death. The headline read: Setrakian, friend of Saroyan, dies. Reeling, my mind created a run-on sentence, one much too long by any journalistic standard. I whispered in silence that he was my friend, too.

It was a measly eight dollars. No, I take that back – it was actually twelve. I was running late for a meeting. My car was running on fumes. Come to think of it, I had been running on empty for the better part of the week myself. Work demands, life issues, and simply not enough hours in the day had siphoned me dry and thrown my daily routine into a complete tailspin. To be perfectly honest, I was feeling out of sync with the universe and like a stranger in my own skin. But today was not the day to stop and figure out why – that would just have to wait. I needed to get gas. Pronto.

In the span of our lifetime, people come and go. They enter and exit our lives. We sometimes bump into them quite by accident and somehow, they become valued and cherished friends. Go figure.