I had dinner last Sunday evening at my daughter’s home. She told me of Eva Saulitis passing. I only knew   Eva through what she recently wrote in the Alaskan Dispatch and the Homer News which gave me quite a blast of her deep, rich and beautiful soul. 

I wasn’t going to make comment on her passing (there are so many others more personally connected to her than I, to do that) until perusing the New York Times Sunday Review I came across these words of Piers J. Sellers, the deputy director of Sciences and Exploration at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, who recently was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer:

“As for me, I’ve no complaints. I’m very grateful for the experiences I’ve had on this planet. As an astronaut I spacewalked 220 miles above the earth. Floating alongside the International Space Station, I watched hurricanes cartwheel across oceans, the Amazon snake its way to the sea through a brilliant green carpet of forest, and gigantic night time thunderstorms flash and flare for hundreds of miles along the Equator. From this God’s-eye-view, I saw how fragile and infinitely precious the earth is. I’m hopeful for its future.

And so, I’m going to work.”

Those words so caught Eva’s sensitive and indomitable spirit I so recently have come to know, I felt compelled to share. My condolences to Eva’s family and friends. I’ll be reading her poetry the rest of my life.

 And, also, a big shout-out to Dickie Gregoire’s passage, a bigger than life Zorba the Greek type guy who will be a part of the lore of this town a hundred years to come. What a song of life, pure jazz, his life made. My condolences also to his family and friends.

Such pure magnificence …

Tim O’Leary