Marie Colvin Died As She Lived -- With Courage and Compassion

By Judith Miller, Fox News

Marie Colvin’s last email to me sought some advice: should she return to Libya or wait for the Syrian visa that the ambassador in London was promising her?

I emailed back: “Go to Syria…more at stake there now, or maybe not.” I stare at that message in horror now.

It was to be my last electronic conversation with my fearless, faithful friend, my companion throughout many a Middle Eastern crisis.

We had met in Paris in 1986 when she was UPI’s bureau chief. She was bored, she confessed. There was no “story” in France.

We last covered the joys of the liberation of Egypt at the room we shared at the Semiramis Hotel overlooking Tahrir Square in February 2011.

“Did you ever think you would see this day?” she exclaimed over one too many scotches in our cramped room, littered with home-made Egyptian flags, liberation posters, newspapers in several languages and chargers for cellphones from a dozen different dangerous assignments.

Unlike me, who had grown complacent covering eternally passive Egypt, Marie always believed that such a day would come. She had faith -- a deep-seated, Catholic conviction -- that the oppressed everywhere would one day rise up, demanding freedom and dignity.  She did more than hope. She traveled relentlessly. And she wrote -- about oppression, and resistance, about evil and fear. What kept her going was the hope that one day, things would change. They had to, she told me.