Charlottesville’s two best hopes have died: Carolyn Corry on September 29th, 1999, and Emily Couric this morning, October 18th, 2001. Emily was one of the few fundamentally good people that I’ve ever known. Her death should not have come as a surprise, given her long illness, but it was. I, like most of her admirers, had convinced myself that she’d overcome pancreatic cancer, that she’d be OK. That was a nice way to spend a year or so, but it wasn’t true. I know that truth is beauty, but sometimes that’s hard to believe. I preferred my fiction, my town’s collective fiction.
Thanks, Emily.