Greece!

We had plans to visit Cambridge last weekend, and a friend from church had also invited us to Dublin for next weekend. All our plans, however, have been thrown into disarray with the untimely death of Demetrios' dearest friend since their boyhood. Our dear Kostas reposed in the Lord on Wednesday morning. Demetrios flew to Greece a few days before, in a frantic effort to save him, and I came Friday. Kostas had had a cardiac arrest a month ago. He was standing outside a pharmacy when his heart stopped, and inside the pharmacy was an emergency room doctor, who promptly resuscitated him, so we thought that rather a miracle and said to ourselves it obviously wasn't Kostas' time yet. But then he was subjected to the malpractice (and I mean that literally) of a Greek hospital, and that sealed his fate. It's hot here; 40 degrees, centigrade, which is 104, Fahrenheit. We are are used to English temps more like 15 - 16 centigrade, which is somewhere in the sixties, Fahrenheit. And that's the HIGH temp! Much colder at night. We've (obviously) been spending all our time with the newly-widowed Mena. Today we are going to catch up on things like unpacking. Returning to England before long, to finish out the "summer" there, such summer as they have there. Hard to believe, the last thing I did before leaving there was turn off the radiators! More another day; I don't feel much like writing today; we are still trying to process the absence of Kostas. So, so strange, that someone should so entirely disappear that in some moments, as Demetrios said, it seems he must never have been here at all. And yet he was... didn't Emily Dickinson write a poem that ends, "And oh, the difference to me!"? Kostas made a huge and wonderful difference.