IMBI TELEPHONED MARGARET ON SATURDAY TO SAY SHE IS DYING THIS WEEK. She is in the final painful days of breast cancer, a condition that had been in remission until a year ago. Staying in her own apartment, she has been a Hospice patient for several months. On Friday she made the decision to stop taking nourishment, including water. She is heroic in death as she was in life. She is one of those persons whom we like to describe by saying they are survivors; but, of course, her condition now and her death in the next few days are reminders that none of us are ultimately survivors.

Imbi, the only child of Vello Simre and Minna Perlas, was born in 1925 in Tartu, a mid-sized, peaceful Estonian college town before the Soviet invasion of the Baltic States. The invasion came when she was fourteen. When she was sixteen her parents, who were university professors, were taken out of their home in the middle of the night and shot to death in a field with a number of other Estonian intellectuals. Her grandmother scrapped together all the money she had and helped the teenager escape to Finland. The only thing besides a few clothes that she took away from her homeland was a rug her grandmother had made. The rug hangs today on a wall in the apartment where she is dying.

From Finland Imbi managed to get to Germany just as the Nazis were dragging that country and the rest of Europe into World War II. The bright, pretty sixteen-year-old managed to stay alive during the awful years of war. She was enrolled in medical school when the war ended. Because she was not German and was a certifiable refugee from Stalin’s Soviet Union, she was accepted as an immigrant to Canada. At McGill University in Montreal she continued her medical studies and became a physician. She practiced medicine in Canada and in the United States. She outlived three husbands but had no children. The world is taking no notice whatsoever of her dying. Elaine, her friend and neighbor for the past thirty years, is staying close. Imbi has asked Elaine to be with her when she dies. Other than that, she is asking very little of the world in this last week of her life.

UPDATE: MONDAY, JUNE 16

Imbi died at 6:35 in the early evening. I had been sitting in her living room writing, occasionally getting up to go to the door to her room to see if she was still breathing. Instead of going back to my writing, for some reason I decided to sit for a minute in the chair beside her bed . Almost at the moment I sat down, her breathing changed: a very short inhalation followed by half a minute of nothing... then another short breath, and I knew the time had come. I took her hand and almost imperceptibly her head moved, and then it was over. I felt her already faint pulse grow fainter and slower until there was nothing. Until that moment I had not liked the term "passed away." I had considered it an unnecessary euphemism. I had thought we should boldly say "died." Now I know. "Passed away" describes exactly what happened. Imbi passed away in an instant... out of existence, gone.

I left the building around eleven o'clock after the Hospice nurse had come and officially pronounced her dead and the mortuary person had come for the "transfer of remains." I walked out into full moon light. I felt incredibly honored... privileged... blessed.