
She was not a morbid person and she should not
be remembered as such, she was not fascinated by death nor the moments that
follow after it, rather she was driven by an unremitting appreciation and admiration
for life. For the lives that had been lived, for the lives that were being lived,
for the lives that would one day be realized. She was not someone easy to understand,
no artist really is, but her art was inconsolable; the greatest art of man is
an exercise in solitude. She would not want to be thought of as a prophet, she
would not want to be called a poet, she would much rather be known as being
reasonable; someone who was in communication with the world and found it neither
absurd nor stifling, neither hell nor heaven nor purgatory nor limbo, but all
of those things in non-simultaneous bursts. Her favorite phrase, and my favorite
phrase of hers that she would say to me when she'd had too much to drink and
too little to eat-Image in nation Universe is not nearly so terrifying as me-has
never left me faltering for faith or reverence.
We are all of us impotent to add or subtract to the succinct understanding in
her emotion, we are, all of us, incompetent standing in her lifeless presence,
and it is for these reasons and many others that we love her. Goodbye, Catherine
Debenshire, goodbye and goodness; in your travels.