Nea Fane – Un Biet Român Pripășit în America / A Hapless Romanian Stuck in The US

Two days ago, I had a brief, unexpected conversation with my doctor’s assistant and I haven’t been able to stop replaying it since. This morning, while walking the dogs, the dialogue echoed in my head with the strange clarity of a dream you can’t quite shake.

It started the way most every interaction in this country starts.

“Hihowareyou?”

One compressed word. The Hello replacement. The standard American greeting that demands the mandatory, frictionless script: “I’m great, thank you! How are you?” Always great. We are a positive-attitude country. After thirty years in the United States, I still struggle with this casual reflex. Back home, if you ask someone how they are doing, you had better pull up a chair. You will hear about their health, their family, their neighbor’s sciatica, and the job troubles of someone you’ve never met. If you don’t actually want to know, you don’t ask.

So, when she said it, I went off script, just for the hell of it.

“Meh,” I shrugged. “How about yourself?”

She paused, looked up, and said, “Not good. I’m grieving.”

The room went still.

“Who are you grieving, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“I lost my son four years ago.”

My heart stopped. “Me too,” I said quietly. “I also lost my son almost four years ago.”

In the minutes that followed, the clinical walls vanished. We talked about what happened, about the cruel randomness of life, and how everything can crumble in a matter of seconds. We both had tears in our eyes.

Then she offered a fragile confession: “My therapist tells me to put my grief in a box and only open it once a week.”

And how is that working for you? I thought. But I didn’t say it. Somewhere I already knew.

Instead, I offered my own imperfect survival tactic: “I think about Cosmin in ten-second increments. All day long, just brief bursts. If I let it go past ten seconds, I completely lose it.”

I saw it in her eyes, she was thinking the exact same thing: And how is that working for you?

Neither of us said a word. Instead, we stepped forward and hugged. We wished each other strength, and then we turned back toward our respective days.

It was an otherworldly encounter. Neither of us possessed a magic formula. Neither a therapist’s metaphorical box nor my ten-second countdown had conquered our sorrow. Grief remains some wild thing that refuses to be managed or tamed; you simply learn to coexist with it while it hollows you out from the inside.

Yet for five minutes in a sterile exam room, two strangers understood each other completely without having to pretend.

Maybe that was enough. Maybe, once in a while, the question is worth asking.