The passing of a friend and colleague—and the upsurge of memories her passing caused in our circle—reminded me again of the strangely luminous mirage a life leaves behind. The body’s gone but the essence abides; it’s real but formless. The mind can grasp and hold it with no effort at all, but the physical of it is barely even there, never mind possessing any weight. This thought recurs quite frequently now—that our lives are inner phenomena, and when someone dies it is a kind of whole that we remember in which the twins of space and time play almost no role at all and values, spirit, joys, and sorrows, words, laughter, memories, and tales together mysteriously fuse into one essence. One can try pulling it apart, but all of it coheres, the professional and the personal, the aspirations, history, events. Even people unlike Helen—she was a lover of words and books, an expert on grammar, a wonderfully funny story teller—people whose lives are lived centered on physical achievements or tangible arts pass and leave behind something irreducibly human and transcending the means or tools they happened to use to be themselves.
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