Eva Markvoort

I think we underestimate how athletic each of us are. How, even if we're not "in shape" we can climb a set of stairs, and although we may be winded, we can still breathe. I am guilty of taking for granted that I have yet to come face to face with a major health obstacle: that I sail freely around each room.

This morning, someone I knew, someone I wish I had the privilege of calling a friend, as she seems to have had nothing but a positive affect on people who did have that privilege, passed away after 25 years fighting cystic fibrosis. To me, she was a best friend of my best friends. I cannot claim to have known her, yet, like any star worth following, I felt as though I did.

From her friends in theatre, her friends from the online community, her friends as a result of her activism, and her friends living with cystic fibrosis, there have been and will be many eloquent things written about Eva Markvoort, all of them true, all of them reaching to express what her, her family and her close friends have experienced, screamed, cried and laughed at in these past couple of months since the acceptance that her battle was coming to an end. Without preface or apology, I'm compelled to reach. To acknowledge that good friends, acquaintances, strangers, and friends of friends are better off just to have heard of Eva.

Suit

—For Eva Markvoort

Put this poem in

a pretty book, if I can

put these words in a pretty place,

a next-stop-to-heart-sink kind of spot,

a here lies the meaning of life sort of joint.

And put my body in the perfect suit

if it goes, if it goes, if it’s something

fit for viewing. Dress it up and pin

these words to my lapel, just so,

and pretend my style

really had panache; make it

look like my arrangement meant the world,

or said anything at all, or everything

at once.