It's pretty good, having the Supper Club - an offshoot of Real Food Nation - ten minutes drive from our home in Santa Fe, and having dinner there this evening was a pretty good way to celebrate the fact that Alice is well enough recovered from her gallbladder surgery to go out to dinner, and - well, I guess, to celebrate being alive. Lauren can't have been out of my thoughts for more than five minutes all day, and every time I saw something as beautiful as this (hardly difficult, in September in Santa Fe) I was hit by the hollow, sinking knowledge that she'd never know the world any more. To think that way is, of course, presumptuous - presumptuous that she would ever have seen it as I do, and it's therefore a reminder of how hard it ever is to see death in terms that don't just reflect one's own preoccupations around life and mortality. But I so hope that she did know it, when she was happy, in all its wonder - and that she would, at some time, have turned her activist strength to its preservation. And there I go again, posthumously reshaping someone to fit my own desires for the person they might and could have been. Yet what I really want to take away from these horrible last two days is the reminder that affirming people matters; that one needs to tell people - and mean it - that it's not just the natural world, but they, too, who are extraordinary, and beautiful, and (though one probably shouldn't actually say this bit), perishable. And to tell them how much they mean to one - not just think it. I bought a fistful of greetings cards today, and will be catching up on some long overdue correspondence.
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