Goodbye to an old friend

As I sat in the customer waiting area at my car dealership this morning, drinking bad coffee, and reading the newspaper, I turned to the obituary page and learned some very sad news: An old friend, and a person I greatly admired, has passed away.

Sally Lilienthal, activist, founder of the Ploughshares Fund, art collector, and mother of remarkable children, has died at age 87.

When I think of Sally, what I remember most are her twinkling eyes. She had terrific passions and beliefs, and she was never afraid to act on them. I knew her as a generous funder of the non-profit Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), as a tireless campaigner against nuclear proliferation; as an art collector who taught me much about the abstract expressionist period; and as a delightful lunch partner at Greens, the vegetarian restaurant on San Francisco's waterfront.

Sally cared about a lot of issues, but none more than nuclear proliferation. This particularly resonates in this dangerous year, when a bumbling American foreign policy has helped enable the rogue leader of North Korea and the rhetorical bully leader of Iran into making moves that have seriously escalated the risk of global nuclear war.

Sally foresaw all of this early on, and campaigned passionately to try and prevent it. She had to be saddened by recent developments, though also had to know she had done as much as any one person could do to try and prevent the human race from destroying itself (ourselves) over the foolishness of power, greed, and domination.

Sally was quite a parent. Her daughter Liza taught me how to be a fundraiser, which helped CIR survive and even thrive against the odds. Her daughter Laurie was a neighbor and friend and fellow traveler when I lived in Mill Valley for a few years, and afterwards. Her son Tom included me on a couple interesting projects. Her son Steve is a great hitter, who helped my softball team, the Michigan Mafia, do better than our motto ("Only the mediocre are always at their best.")

As it turns out, before reading the article of her passing, I'd been reading a book by another old friend of mine, a man of quite a different political persuasion, who is battling prostate cancer, and who is wise in ways that transcend ideology or even his behavior, which has often been provocative and objectionable.

I marked a striking line in his book: "We are creatures of desires that cannot be satisfied and of dreams that will not come true."*

Somehow, to me, mostly on an intuitive level, this seems a fitting epitaph for Sally. She probably also would appreciate the perversity of the citation, from a strictly political perspective, below. Her children may know better, but the most fitting way I can honor her memory is to say she was a vibrant human being, no doubt with flaws, but to me, always so enchantingly alive. Especially through those curious, sparkling eyes.

She is the kind of person who remains alive in our memories, long after she has passed away in the physical realm.

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* - "The End of Time," by David Horowitz

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