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 made the necessary phone call; and while I waited for the Hospice nurse to come, I went back and read what I had written only a few minutes before Imbi died.

"Where in this tiny, withered, dying frailness is the young girl who defied pogroms, invasions, and a major war while hanging on to a rug her grandmother had made? How remarkable that she didn't just give it up, leave it accidently on purpose at a military check-point or a ferry boarding dock or a train station. How much easier it would have been for the frightened teenager to let the rug go and to let the black swastikas on their blood-red field persuade her, take her, use her, discard her. She told me once that there was a time in Germany during the war when she moved every two weeks to keep the Nazis from catching her and putting her to work in a war factory. I don't know how she managed to go to school in a country at war, a country that wasn't hers. Perhaps it was that she spoke German, French and English in addition to her native Estonian. She was blond and pretty. She was Lutheran. She was very bright. She was determined and brave."

I left the building around eleven o'clock after the Hospice nurse had come and officially pronounced Imbi 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.