Although I did not know her, there is a young woman that has been on my mind recently. We shared the same classmates, the same campus, the same professors, and the same ultimate fate: though hers, devastatingly, far too soon. There is eagerness in her words: saturability, a blend of sagacity and youthful curiosity. She is idealistic, yes, but in a way that every optimistic mover-and-shaker must be. She was a writer, hoping to use words as a positive expression of change. What loss: what loss of words, of written words, of eloquence, of thoughts that inspire and sustain.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains; but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
-Tennyson
For what is loss without gain: here but a small reminder to live fully, embracingly, openly, eagerly.