Recently, the comments on my Washington Post partums list-serv, which grew exponentially in February with the abrupt firing of up to 300 from the newsroom, have had two main themes: Bemoaning our depleted former newspaper (but with congratulations for its 2025 Pulitzers, including to a former Post photographer) and a series of fond remembrances of newly departed former colleagues.

I am reminded of the alumni newsletter from Washington’s segregated Central High School, which closed in 1950 to become all-Black Cardozo High School. Over the years, the newsletter, now produced by the aging children of deceased alumni, has been filled with obituaries. Remarkably, 76 years on, it still comes out, but it’s no longer news when the once spirited Centralites are gone. It’s par for the course.

I’ve lost two good friends recently. Both were in their mid-80s. The first, Kevin Klose, was better known as CEO of NPR, where he landed a $200 million bequest from Joan Kroc, the widow of McDonald’s president Ray Croc, thus assuring NPR’s sustainability even in the era of Trump cuts. He also ran Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and served as dean of the University of Maryland Journalism School. Before all that, he was a Washington Post editor, my editor among many, and one of the best.

When he became NPR president in 1998, we exchanged notes. “Part of the great fun is hearing from friends from across the years,” he wrote. “It helps me understand that NPR is truly the nation’s radio service, a true public trust. So.. stay in touch. Your old(er) friend & colleague, Kevin.” And so we did, after I’d left the Post in 2004.

Kevin had edited one of my stories in the first months of my Post career. I had come to the paper in February 1970 with a news lead I’d brought with me from housing sources when I’d worked for the Philadelphia Bulletin. It concerned an assistant HUD secretary from Norfolk accused to alleged improprieties and conflicts of interest, and Kevin happened to be the Virginia editor. Once I’d reached the official, who,, of course, denied any wrongdoing, he abruptly resigned, and the story ran on A10, inside the front section, rather than on A1. Kevin had fought valiantly for it.

A few years later, Kevin was the Maryland editor, and I had amassed a lot of notes for a story I was then incapable of assembling into a publishable draft. “What you have here,” Kevin told me, “is an embarrassment of riches.” Such a gentle way of offering constructive criticism to a struggling reporter for which I was and am forever grateful.

The second friend you won’t read about in The Washington Post, where obits are mostly by the AP and generally do not include local lives, unless in paid death notices. So here’s one from me: John R. (Jack) Wennersten was a a prolific author whose 14th book “A Capital Environment” is due to be published posthumously by Georgetown University Press. Jack always had a “next” book, despite his wife’s plea that each one would be his “last,” so they could spend their “golden years” doing other things.

We first met when I was working on a story on the Eastern Shore about a kosher poultry plant in the unlikely-named place of Wango, Maryland, and Jack was a history professor at UMES-the University of Maryland/Eastern Shore, a historically Black college. At Johnny and Sammy’s, then a favorite hangout for local geezers on Route 50 in Salisbury, Jack introduced me to Litman Litow, a Jewish chicken farmer who had been a partisan during the war, and, of course, I got to write about him.

A few words about Jack’s amazing output. His book “The Oyster Wars of Chesapeake Bay” is the definitive work on this remarkable chapter in maritime and Maryland history. “Leaving America” anticipated the exodus of Americans to foreign lands. “Rising Tides: Climate Refugees in the Twenty-First Century” forecast the human migration from areas that are no longer habitable. His “25 Bicycle Tours on Delmarva” is a fun guide for those inclined to so navigate its flatlands. His most recent book “Strange Fruit: Racism and Community Life in the Chesapeake-1850 to the Present” is about Somerset County, on Maryland’s lower Eastern Shore. The county intended it to be published for the 1976 Bicentennial, but they wanted a sanitized “Gone with the Wind.” So Jack resurrected it to reveal its actual history.

Jack met his wife Ruth Ellen when both were getting degrees at the University of Maryland in College Park. They were at first seemingly an odd couple, he from blue collar Pittsburgh, she a Jewish Brooklynite. But they turned out to be a perfect match.

After Jack “retired” from UMES, they moved to Capitol Hill. We met regularly for breakfast, alternating between the Tune Inn on Pennsylvania Avenue SE and the Tastee Diner in downtown Silver Spring. When he was no longer able to make it to SS, I drove down to his townhouse, and we hobbled over to the Tune Inn and to a closer place the last time. Jack had cystic fibrosis and was well aware of his mortality. But Ruth Ellen died first, a year ago, while they were vacationing in Costa Rica.

Ruth Ellen was the love of his life, and Jack was devastated, but, despite her death and his declining health, he was resilient and carried on. Last summer Jack and a widower friend went on a bucket list trip that took them to Saugerties, New York, where we met again, with Jack’s oxygen tank along for the ride. His last hurrah came in March, while he was staying at what he called his “country place” in Berkeley Springs, W.Va. He was with friends and family when his heart gave out. Sounds trite, but his spirit lives on. And it was celebrated recently at a wine bar on the Anacostia waterfront. With perhaps a hundred there, it was more like a joyful wake than a solemn funeral.

Jack was among my best and dearest friends, always encouraging me, and inspiring me with his tireless work ethic and prolific output. The last time we spoke, he was asking me questions about the contract he was about to sign with Georgetown University Press. He was once again off to Berkeley Springs, and the plan was to get together again when he got back. Sadly, that will not now happen.

Our lives are defined by both internal and external forces, within and beyond our control, and then, ultimately, they come to an end.

There is, of course, the innocence of youth, when possibilities seem infinite and life and time endless. As a teenager in 1925, my father Gerard Previn Meyer — later an educator, raconteur, author and poet — composed a verse insisting that:

We shall be young: we shall not age

nor see our fellows age about us:

nor break our ranks: time shall not rout us,

nor any power turn the page

on which our names are writ in gold:

oh, we at least shall not grow old.

Then, of course, we do. But mourn not. As the saying goes, that’s life