My friend, Chris Hondros--how lucky I was to call him that, died in the Libyan city of Miserata tonight while on assignment for Getty. Chris was a respected colleague in a profession where not everyone is. He was smart and would engage us on any number of topics that mattered, including the ins and outs of covering conflict. He wasn’t afraid to tell you what he thought, and it was obvious that he spent a lot of time deciding what to think. He was one of the world’s best at capturing conflict, and he could talk endlessly, both practically and intellectually, about the photos he took and why the images mattered. I had dinner with Chris and his fiance, Christina, a few weeks ago at La Bodega in Cairo. We spent three hours (or was it four?) sitting at a little table near the bar eating ravioli and eggplant salad, drinking wine and sparkling water. I gave them a small engagement present, and we talked about journalism, about our work, about why we do what we do, about Baghdad, about our colleague, Joao Silva. Chris and Christina offered to find a gallery in New York for Conflict Zone, our multimedia photo exhibit that opens in Chicago in a few weeks. They had been scouting neighborhoods in Cairo and planned to move to Egypt after they got married in August. As long as I’ve known Chris, he has always been the life of the party, never lacked for friends or companions. In fact, many of us in the press corps were surprised to hear he was settling down, although the more I talked to him and Christina that night, the more I realized that settling down only meant that he was going to bring Christina, a former AP photographer and now a lawyer, on the journey. He was happier than I had ever known him. When Hannah Allam called from Cairo tonight to tell me that Chris had been gravely injured, I was throwing a dinner party like I used to do in Baghdad where I met Chris in 2004. Hannah warned me that the news about his condition was conflicting--some outlets had already reported that he had died, but I got on Twitter anyway and tried to follow the latest, the smallest hopes and dashes, until I fell asleep holding a picture of me and my oldest nephew. If combat journalism were a law firm, I’d be a summer associate, not even a junior partner. My years in Afghanistan and Iraq, even covering Fallujah, are blips compared to the battles that Chris has seen. I haven’t been to Libya where he died. I’m now transitioning from daily journalism to academia, a move that will force me to find ways to remain relevant. Even so, I’ve seen enough death as a combat journalist not to be startled by it. I have lost other friends. Yet I am startled by his loss and not just because Chris was so damn good at what he did. And not because he did his job and would have bristled at being called courageous or brave. Those of us who do this work get that. Thank you for telling me to be safe but really it’s about being smart. Chris was a few months older than me. He turned 41 in March. This is the way the world often turns when you cover war, when you make a life out of your life’s work. A relationship is impossible to sustain when you are always leaving. A relationship is difficult when someone feels you are choosing a story, a risk over them. It makes no sense to people who have never done this. So many of us wait. We wait until we find someone who understands that what we do is who we are. We wait until life taps us on the shoulder or until we tap ourselves on the shoulder and then we decide that if want something more than the photo or the story we have to sit still long enough to have it. Chris didn’t die waiting for his life to begin. Chris died living. Perhaps that’s what makes this so hard. I’m not mourning what he almost had or what he had just found or where he was headed. I’m mourning where he was, and that was an extraordinary place for anyone to be.