My friend Kim Fellner has left us

 

If you were lucky enough to have known Kim, you know she spent her life struggling for justice with joy and grace. That's all anyone can do in whatever way is their own. 

Through the labor movement, through community organizing, through too many elections, she made the rounds, trying to make us better at our work. And making us laugh, often at ourselves.

There will be many obituaries, most from people who had worked more closely with Kim than I in recent years. And she wrote her own story of her coming death in her hometown paper, the Washington Post [gift links]: Field notes from the end of life: My thoughts on living while dying and Living with dying: A breathtaking collapse in the writer’s health.

How like Kim to have managed this one last task ... the world is a much sadder place without her. May the memory of Kim spur us to do the work of justice and compassion that she never stopped doing.

An apology: I have a vast archive of photos that I've taken of people I've known and sometimes loved. But when I looked for an image of Kim, all I found was this one from 2005. She avoided my camera, apparently. I scanned the web for the source noted on the photo, but it seems to have gone away ...