Samer Iskandar, a former FT correspondent, handed away on August 13, 2024 in Paris. He was 57. He remained accompanied all through his sickness by his loving spouse Isabelle and daughter Violette.
To be penning this obituary for him as we speak is tough. Samer was my mentor and, with out the steadying rhythm of our conversations, I wrestle to search out my footing. Nonetheless I’ll observe the recommendation he at all times gave me after I stalled earlier than a sentence: maintain your foot on the fuel and write.
Samer was a financier, instructor, researcher and journalist. To attempt to sum up his profession throughout so many industries, roles and places is a problem maybe solely he may have risen to. He was a board member on the Banque Libano-Française, a senior commentator on the BBC, an govt director at Euronext and a journalist at this very newspaper, the place from 1996 to 2001 he served as an Worldwide Capital Markets reporter, the Brussels correspondent, the Paris correspondent and the editor-in-chief of the journal Connectis.
Sam was keen about economics, and his ability with numbers was maybe matched solely by his ability with tales. This was a person who, after I requested him what yr he’d met his spouse Isabelle, put it to me like this: “Our first date was in Francs; by our second, we’d already switched to the euro.”
However one of many roles Sam cherished most was being a professor. From 2010 till he fell ailing, he taught finance on the ESCP Enterprise College. As one in every of his college students, albeit in one other self-discipline, I felt in good firm the day I learn the a whole bunch of testimonials of different younger individuals whose mental, private {and professional} lives Sam had so profoundly impacted.
I wrote about Sam’s sickness within the FT Weekend Journal earlier this yr, after which he and I continued assembly frequently to jot down, asserting as half-joke half-wish that we have been now engaged on a guide. By this summer season, when he may now not communicate, we sat within the Jardin du Luxembourg, the place we listened to music. Or within the Church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the place we lit candles. Or on his balcony, the place we lit cigarillos. The phrase that each one these reminiscences carry to my thoughts now could be merely: braveness. Samer was, sadly, too witty to have the ability to use it about himself. (“Have you ever ever heard anybody say, ‘died final evening after a cowardly battle along with his tumour?” he as soon as joked to me in Arabic.) But his story is incomplete with out it.
Samer was brave in essentially the most important sense of the time period. Braveness, from the previous French corage, from the Latin cor, which means the center. Certainly, the center remained Sam’s anchor whilst his mind took the storm. He remained pushed by, and geared in the direction of, a single thought: to spend as a lot time as he may along with his spouse Isabelle and daughter Violette. Typically he appeared so staunch on this conviction that he nearly made me forfeit science, discarding his prognosis’s harsh actuality in favour of an an previous picture which he, the statistician, knew higher than to indulge: that an unstoppable pressure, if met with an immovable object, may but fail.
As I write this sentence, the bells of the Church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés are tolling behind me. Sam was buried yesterday. All through the day, his mates saved saying, to at least one one other or to themselves: Sam would have smiled at this; Sam would have advised this joke. I may overhear whispers rippling by the rows of the church, like an echo of Sam’s life chopping by the ache and lack of his absence. One funeral-goer wore a Harley Davidson tee-shirt, becoming for the person who in February of 1998 wrote an FT article succinctly titled: “Get a Life – Get a Harley”.
Sam’s coffin was carried away to the sound of his favorite music, The Police’s “Can’t Stand Shedding You”. The priest appeared confused upon listening to these perky drums begin up and, for a second, he narrowed in on the organ prefer it was main a mutiny, which I couldn’t assist however assume would have made Sam giggle.
Most of his lifelong mates’ tales, 5 many years from Beirut to Paris of what Sam euphemistically referred to, to us children, as “les 400 coups”, couldn’t be advised in church. They have been shared later that evening over the ice cream he liked greatest. Above all Sam’s daughter, Violette, held shut and protected by her mom Isabelle, regarded extra like him than she ever had earlier than, that very same gentleness within the eyes, that very same playfulness within the smile.
It jogged my memory of that sense of an after-image I had so usually felt with Sam throughout our months of writing collectively. Typically after I regarded away from him, down in the direction of my pocket book to document one thing he’d stated or out in the direction of the town to catch some element he’d noticed, one thing unusual occurred. It appeared to me that his smile was possessed of a sort of visible echo, one thing reserved normally not for individuals however for brilliant lights, which, after you’ve regarded into them after which closed your eyes, endure.
