[Prestidigitweeze]

Having had to write my own mother's eulogy recently, I chose to publish it after realizing I wasn't alone in shouldering private grief. It was the right thing to do just as this thread about Patricia is right.

Too many people struggle with the feeling that their loved one was precious in the face of apparent indifference. Suddenly, there is a hole that swallows the earth and air -- a rift that isolates -- yet no one else seems to see it.

I want them to see it.

Perhaps we shouldn't have to witness to posterity that a person in our lives was important, but I say there's a duty to do so. No renovating stranger should ever be allowed to dismantle the reliquaries of familial/maternal/romantic love as if they were voting booths.

This one mattered. I know so. I testify so to time.

May Patricia's memory resonate with all who esteem their own families, who wish to honor the blood-bound volunteers who conceived and supported them. They loved us willingly and unwaveringly and they continue to do so in the mind, as time winds down.

May all who encounter Patricia's memory learn of the masterpieces she created on the web and in life. She composed a cantata and it was you, wrote novels and they were the narratives of others' progress -- were the aesthetic joys she communicated here and in the sociophysical world.

May all who encounter her here -- and through you, Chris, and you, Marc (her friend), and all other intimates who remain -- come to realize that the arc of her life continues: in her work, of course, but also in those who survive her. You whose present is her legacy and whose destiny is her future.