May Her Memory be a Blessing

A friend of mine (St John's tutor from way back whom I used to drive around town) died in August. I was never that close to her, and her death makes me sad in that general 'I will miss you' kind of way that I feel when non-close friends or non-immediate relatives die. Since my parents are still alive and all my closest friends are still with us, this is all I've known of death - missing people.
Mostly I suppose I wanted to share a bit about her. Chaninah Maschler was born in the Berlin in 1931 but grew up in the Netherlands. She was Jewish. The first thing I heard her say about the war was 'I didn't go outside much', then she had been hiding with a gentile family in Utrecht, that her brother had run messages for the resistance, and that she'd survived the hunger winter of 1944-1945.  I later learned that her Mother had survived Bergen-Belsen, and her brother had not.

She was a philosopher to the bone. Sharp like Wittgenstein or Pascal, not jovial like Hume. She was a Pierce scholar (and general fan of pragmatism) who studied at Princeton and had ended up at St John's because she was friends with a faculty member there, I think it was Eva Brann. Knew Rorty a bit, I am not sure how well. That's to say she had a mind like a trap, and I could only just keep up.
She married an artist and art dealer who (as far as I can tell) had never gone past high school, and as far as I can tell she was happy with him until he died a couple of years before I met her. She had two twin daughters.

I last saw her two months before she died, trying and failing to solve printer problems for her. My biggest regret is that I saw her less than I ought to have when she had cancer. My last memory of her was that she was much the same as ever, but weaker and more tired. I am glad I have that.