Obit: Victoria Regina Shouldis

 Not much of a picture, but I couldn't find a better.

Two months ago, I mentioned a friend dying of cancer.  The link, in turn, carries a note from years ago.  Remarkable woman, and her obituary, which she wrote herself, was in today's Monitor.

A brilliant Trivial Pursuit player - and I specifically sought her out for a particular competition (another teammate was a Jeopardy! winner who died earlier this year. I thought the competition was going to be severe, but we dominated embarrassingly) - and a witty, kindly person, I loved talking with her. She had briefly been a DJ in New York, and was one of the few people I knew who not only recognised "Alison Gross," but knew a female Wiccan DJ named Alyson who had used it as her theme music. She was full of little tidbits like that, which is a small but clannish subculture in our society.

And yet...

Can you imagine a libertarian, paleocon, or anarcho-monarchist writing their obituary with quite this same tone about political persuasion? She was not an arrogant person in the least, - and there is some tone of self-deprecation here, to be sure - but the sense of assurance of correctness here is found only on the fringes of other political movements.

Ah well, she was in general a nicer person than I. The conceit one inherits from a POV is perhaps only a small part of us, and not one that is measured by God in the fiery proof of our works.