Memory Eternal

Her name was Suki. I can all but hear her saying that it still is. Some say she was the model for Carla on Cheers. Must have been the attitude she would put on, there was not much other resembance. Tall, beautiful, the way Armenian women can be beautiful. A sculptor, painter in real life, waited tables to make ends meet, perhaps for the human contact as well. Started at the local about four years after the Goodbar murder, which began with a pickup there. Disappeared for maybe a decade, maybe two, came back a couple of years ago, weak from the chemo. Scheduled her shifts around that, worked until she was hospitalized again. We stopped by her room at Lenox Hill after Liturgy Sunday. Exhausted by many earlier visitors, she was sleeping with her eyes open but rolled up and back, mouth open unnaturally wide like a lion's, gasping for breath, body shaken by frequent jolts of pain -- she had complained to us last visit that the hospital staff was nagging her to give herself more morphine. Sunday the nurse explained that she wasn't in any unusual distress, that that's just the way it was when she let go. We didn't try to wake her. Yesterday evening at about six she let go for the last time and found rest, or so we might hope. What explicit hopes she might herself have entertained, I never presumed to ask. She was working the twelve steps as best she could, and was in that way a practical mystic of sorts, and maintained heroic good humor in the most severe trials.

One less reason to eat out. Wouldn't be the same. Can't afford it anyway.

Eternal memory.

Where Celtdom is heard a discouraging word...

"There is a received wisdom that the origin of the people of these islands lie in invasions or migrations... but the affinities don't point eastwards to a shared origin," said Daniel Bradley, co-author of a genetic study into Celtic origins.