What is there to say?

What can I possibly say? Rogers and ITHOM have surely said it; they have said what they have the right to say; a friend is gone, and they feel the hole bigger than I; it's done... it's out there, and commented on, and so why do I feel the need or desire to say anything? What have I the right to feel?

I've spent the last week tied up in the comparatively banal, the mundane... IQ being a pain in the arse; worrying about my students; stressing about how many hours there aren't in the day to work; work, work, work... Others have spent the same time grieving, ahead of the time of passing.

Everything this friend could have done is now stopped. Anything more will be by the hand of those who are left. "Her book was nearly finished," said Rogers when I saw him... He said that efforts will be made to finish it for her. Good plan, I thought; seems right and proper. But what use is any of it? We are variously sad at her passing... but why does the unfinished work matter? I say this not to lessen her importance as a person while she was here, heaven forbid... but as another question about the importance of the work that any of us do. It is, for certain, what makes us Us. But none of it would help prevent a pointless death such as this one: isn't it all a little self-indulgent, what many of us do?

That said, perhaps "medical advances" and the like are in fact even more arrogant than the kind of work that we all do, and she did: perhaps those all-important scientific researchers, who are allowed to claim the moral high ground (indeed, to whom I willingly give said high ground so often...), perhaps they imagine they are doing something truly Worthy. At least I admit I'm doing what I do because it makes me happy, because I'm just interested; if anybody works to make themselves happy, to fill themselves with purpose, is that not one of the greatest things we can do to justify our own continued existence? And then, if we were to suddenly stop being able to do it, it would become pointless, unless it made someone else happy to complete it on my behalf, but only for them... this is not coming out right. My own instinct is to change, to try harder to make the most of the life I am lucky enough to have, to make my work more efficient, to make sure I finish as much as I can just in case... my counterinstinct is to consider everything totally pointless and jack it all in. But really, I guess I should just carry on what I do; we all should. Really, there's no point in doing otherwise.

As Rogers said of the passing of Baudrillard, we mourn to honour; if, at various conferences and in various publications, this friend is acknowledged in her absence, if her book is completed and posthumously published, it will be an act of honouring to mourn.

I don't feel the hole like Rogers and ITHOM, and others; but I feel a hole nonetheless. She was, it must be said (and it will be, many times, I hope), a singularly determined person who in that respect put the rest of us to shame. She was also, as ITHOM points out, utterly ready and resolved to her own imminent death. That, perhaps more than anything else she ever did in life, is something that totally humbles me. In a way, for my own part, it makes her death a little easier to take; it's cruel and pointless and it makes me angry, but in herself she was ready--it's the rest of us who weren't.