Over the years, including HERE, I've yammered about how much I loved COLLECTING CHILDREN'S BOOKS. Every Sunday I'd faithfully check in on Peter's latest "Sunday brunch" writeup on children's literature. This being the times we're in, I became his Facebook friend, and I can't say it didn't make me happy whenever he commented on something I'd posted. Over the past year he's been giving us updates on a book on children's literature he was co-authoring with two other people, and his excitement about the project was contagious. To me he was a quasi-celebrity just because I didn't know him personally, but I was a huge fan of his blog.
About a week ago he mentioned on FB he'd badly broken his ankle, to which I, like everybody else I reckon, thought " oh gee, that sucks" and didn't think much about it. Just a broken ankle, after all.
Saturday night, a message came from his brother on Peter's FB page that Peter had suddenly died, presumably from a blood clot. A happy, young (early 50's) guy in the midst of finishing his dream of authoring a book on children's books dropped dead, gasping to his mother (he was taking care of his 90 year-old parents) to call 911. Just like that.
I'm not saying I'm curled up under my bed crying; as I said, I never actually met him, but that's the way the world works now - our celebrity culture allows us to think of a major celebrity as we would a close friend, and the internet takes this a step farther in that we get caught up in the lives of people we'll never meet who are celebrities in our eyes because we're fans of their websites/blogs, but in actuality, they're no more "famous" than ourselves. I am somewhat comforted to see that based on the number of comments on his Facebook page, I'm only one of dozens (hundreds) of people touched by his blog and now saddened by his sudden death.
A broken ankle. Dead. It's quite simply the saddest thing I've ever heard.
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