Sin of the Month • Abby Bardi
	Death

As I was leafing  through the May  issue of the Voice the other day, I was horrified to discover a photo of long-time Takoma Park Folk Festival maven Lenore Robinson accompanied by a notice of her death.

I didn't know Lenore well, but I spent several years with her on the TPFF Program Committee. Though the meetings could be tempestuous at times, Lenore was always patient, diplomatic, devoted, and kind. Since then, I have bumped into her once a year at the festival, and it's always been a pleasure to see her striding across the grounds with a walkie-talkie on her hip; she was the sort of person who, without knowing it, brightened your day just by saying hello.   

I've begun to think that death is basically a very bad idea. I understand all the usual arguments in its favorÑfor example, if there were no death, how would we make room for all the babies being born? The criticism I would direct to the Higher Power who allegedly created this world is that it was a mistake not to have designed the earth to be infinitely expandable and able to house everyone in perpetuity. Why not? If He or She could come up with the atom, the bumblebee, the rose, and Johnny Depp, why not a more functional planet?

Some people argue that death is an essential part of life, and that without it, we wouldn't experience the sweet poignancy of time's passage, the annual drama of the return of spring from winter's cold embrace, the high of life's most ecstatic momentsÑand that makes some sense, but I don't care. Death strikes me as just plain lousy.    

I've concluded this because recently, a few other people I knew have died, both, like Lenore, tragically young.

The first, Diana, a colleague much beloved by everyone, was around Lenore's age. I keep bumping into reminders of Diana in my in-boxÑnotes she scrawled on handouts about MLA documentation; a recipe for her amazing mango seafood salad. I wonder if I will ever stop missing her at meetings, where we used to argue about whether or not to give students copies of tutoring formsÑa raging controversy that seemed important at the time.

The other person I know who died much too young recently was my father's lifelong best friend, who had just turned 80. I knew Hal all my lifeÑhis was one of the faces leaning over my crib when I was bornÑand I still have trouble believing he's gone. He was an erudite, charming person, an advertising exec with a master's degree in Classics and a fierce hatred of George W. Bush; he was fluent in French and had been a conscientious objector in World War II.

When I saw him at his 80th birthday party, though he was obviously ill, he did not seem to have aged at allÑhe was still the witty, vital person I had always known, and it had never before occurred to me how strange the world would seem without him.

It's clear to me that when people die, it's their particularity we miss; their quiddity. For weeks after Diana and Hal diedÑwhich they did at around the same time, and of the same kind of cancerÑI kept thinking about their voices, and how clearly I could still hear them, and of how their voices were suffused with their essences. I can hear Lenore's voice, tooÑgentle, unassuming, reasonableÑand I'm glad that people do not just depart entirely from the earth, but leave pieces of themselves behind for us to contemplate.

But that is no compensation for the crummy unfairness of Death, and how it seems to consistently happen to all the wrong people, and how devastating it isÑfor if I am so sad to lose Lenore, whom I only saw once a year and whose path crossed mine only briefly, I can only imagine how distraught everyone close to her must be.  

If death is a bad idea, war, then, is obviously an even worse one. Every person's life begets a web, sparkling strands spun across wide spaces, often asymmetrical, sometimes turning to dust, but composed of almost invisible threads that reach much further than we are aware. When one life ends, that web collapses, and untold numbers of people are affected by its absence. In a war, almost no one is allowed the drama of his or her own death; war casualties are mere numbers that we see on the front page, statistics that we don't connect with the infinite particularity of one individual whose passing may touch hundreds, even thousands of people.

When a government sends people to war for the sake of some vague ideaÑor worse, for reasons that aren't clear and are based on liesÑthey are not calculating the value of one human life correctly; their computation is faulty because they are not taking into consideration the web of connections between one person's life and those of many others, so each "casualty" of battle (a strange word, as if there is anything casual about it) should in fact be multiplied, even squared, then squared again.

While we can't do anything about death, we could certainly work harder to avoid war. It seems odd that a team of health care professionals will spend hours of their lives and thousands of dollars trying to save someone who has been injured, but that we will blithely commit thousands of "troops" to an action that will cause significant "collateral damage."

If the people responsible for the war in Iraq understand the calculus of death, they obviously prefer to ignore it.

Meanwhile, when I do the math here at home, it's clear to me that the loss of one unique person, Lenore Robinson, is incalculably vast.