Goodbye Lale…

33, dead of can­cer. Lale was such a spark of love. Sharp as a tack, fun­ny and warm, she just walked into our lives one day as a col­league, walked a while as a friend, and walked out the next.

All day this has been haunt­ing me. I worked until almost mid­night at the office, throw­ing myself into a GoogleEarth map of Ira­ni­an tar­gets that the Bush­Hawks are prob­a­bly con­sid­er­ing for tac­ti­cal nuclear strikes, and how many casu­alties that will mean (3 mil­lion, by the reck­on­ing of the Physi­cians for Social Respon­si­bil­i­ty) and here was this sin­gle human death of some­one I knew and loved and was inspired by, snuffed out. Hov­er­ing. Some­place in a cor­ner of my mind where I couldn’t give it space, had to keep it at bay.
I man­aged to grab a moment in one of the qui­et rooms in our open-plan office. Just a moment, long enough to let some emo­tion through but not enough to let the weight of it come down. I was at work.
I was look­ing out at the sky and there was a sin­gle small smudge of cloud again­st a blue sky. And I saw Lale. And a gull flew across my vision. And I saw Lale. And I said a small good­bye, and I saw her smile in my mind’s eye.

And I went back to work.

–b