How can someone so vibrant, so full of purpose, just leave us? She was killed in Homs, one of many thousands now, by a dictator who is still not being taken to task by anyone.
This getting together at St Martin in the Fields had been purposefully designed as well. All were welcome; it was not an in-crowd gathering of hacks only. So the great and the good mingled with people like me, and the lady in a black beret, who sat all the way in the back and cried softly and had to leave.
People read poems, and a politician, a poet, a fellow journalist talked about their friendships. These were not really laudations, they were attempts to conjure up the woman Marie for us, the friend, the wife, trying to grasp her, and make her be with us one more time. And we all felt the sadness of this generous truthful, courageous human being not being here anymore. What a loss!
Even the music chosen couldn’t comfort us, even The Deer’s Cry by Shaun Davies, a hauntingly beautiful, true lament if ever I heard one, left us desolate, raw with knowing that a good woman and a tremendous person is no longer here.
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