She was a mother who’d lost a child, which no doubt gave her a greater need to believe in eternity than most. She hoped to see her son again. I have no doubt that she is with him right now, that he received her, and that they share knowledge of why they had to endure the separation, and so many other sorrows that particularly she met in life.

Is it selfish of me to hope that somehow the good she did in life, and the endurance of the pain of having been disappointed by it, might give her some kind of karmic standing, as it were, to help those of us still laboring on earth to increase peace and justice in the human family, using, specifically, the levers of politics that remain to us (”if we can keep them” as Ben Frankling said)?

I have no idea how things work in the life beyond what we know with our senses. But six decades on this planet has taught me that there are forces around us that do help because they are strong enough to remain attached to a human condition they are free to escape, if they choose.  I think if you have tried to help in this life, you win the right to help after it (see Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” for Scroog’e observation of the pitiful souls who had the power to intervene for the good when they lived, never used it, and now suffer grievously, with constant, mournful wailing, their impotence.)  Elizabeth Edwards goes to joy and reunion.  Because of her vision of solidarity having extended even to an event that we in the West often envision as the loneliest journey, to be feared, I dare hope that she will still be with us as we work towards peace and justice and solidarity in the human community she’s left behind – at least in the realm of our senses – here on earth.

This photo shows the immediate aftermath of a high-five we exchanged. I’d never met her before. I am flipping out because she said, “Didn’t you write “I Am Dog?” Hysterically funny!”  I had written that parody (of what I had considered, in my twenty-something irreverence, the much-too-serious, annoyingly inescapable “I Am Woman”) three decades ago, and we hired to perform it on the debut show of “Saturday Night Live.” The parody laws were different then (SNL eventually helped change them) and permission was needed from Helen Reddy and Jeff Wald – who did not grant it.  The parody had only occurred in print, in a compendium of women’s humor (”Titters.” ) It blew my mind that she knew. Good briefers, and she was brilliant and personable.

However she knew, I had made her laugh.  I’m proud of that now.  (Oh vanity – here I am mourning her loss and already it’s tinged with me, me, me. What can I say?) The stories we can tell are those that happen to us; we meet, work, live, laugh, love, demonstrate, strive in community. We have this time to meet and do something, or just be together, and then we lose it and move to another kind of time, another kind of being, I guess.  Those left behind must mourn, remember, and live on as we know. Some of us only meet in the most fleeting moments; some of us never meet, but still hear about one another and therefore cherish what we know from what we’ve heard, and mourn the loss, even though we’re spared what the close-loved ones must endure – the ongoing pain of an empty place in the heart for the rest of life.

I remember my first night on the internet. My husband had a big desk PC. I got the address of a friend’s fan website and entered it and a green line appeared, filling in an empty line space for what seemed like hours. I had never “surfed” before. I remember thinking I was seeing the arrival of the future as that green line filled in and, finally, an image popped up. Hello future.

When I was younger, I thought that burial of bodies in coffins was obviously going to have to end at some point (now that I’m older, okay, I’m more lured by the illusion that graveyards are enjoyable real estate and do I want a view? But, ashes to ashes, honey.) I imagined the best way to memorialize people’s lives would be to have a shoe-box-sized Memorial Box – yeah, like a bank deposit box – with their written thoughts. This assumed, of course, that people would all write down their thoughts, which ignores vast swaths of oral tradition. But if we subsituted them simply for all the mahogany and brass coffins in Western culture, it’d still be a good idea.

Blogs are the Memorial Boxes! And we can visit them while the people are alive and changing them! This is a good thing. The evanescence of the digital world – well, I’m an actress. I’m used to evanescence. Whatever goes out onstage in a performance is impossible to capture unless you’re there in the audience to receive it. It’s what the spiritual masters call Darshan, I guess. Or Dharma transmission. Getting something from the fact of simultaneous physical presence in space and time. This isn’t that.

Welcome to my Evanescent Memorial Box.

Yes, I twitter. I blog on more public sites (pdamerica.org and HuffPo). But here – well, it’s me thinking Inside the Box, which we all must do. It’s a good thing. When we start casting our egos about in inappropriate places and trying to figure out what we think by acting out what we haven’t thought through – well, it’s less helpful if we haven’t done some contemplation and meditation as prep. I’m an activist. I believe in action. But not any kind of action: thoughtful action, effective action. So we have to be freer in our thoughts, to consider the possibilities. And writing is thinking. And I”m grateful for it.