Preface

Everyone has their own Marian because Marian always responded to the particularity of each person she was with. Yet, the constellating of commemorations in this volume show us a full and coherent person, who can be touched in the silences behind the words, as well in the words of those who cared so much, and they are multitudinal—far more than the memorials represented here. The people who loved Marian also live in the silences of their unspoken words, and fill the space with Marian's life. We reach in the darkness to try to remember, characterize, make present again who she was to each one of us. We do it to carry her and her ideas with us, inside of us, to help our patients, to help psychoanalytic thought, and clinical work move forward, as she did, actively, until she fell into a coma two days before her death and did not reawaken. That ending was the forward edge of her own life. “I can't explain it to you,” she said to me shortly before she died, “this space hovering between life and death, this waiting to die. … I have no words.” Nor had I asked the question, but it sounded like a hovering, a wondering, an expectancy, an exploration. It sounded like meeting a last forward edge—and who knows what that might bring? Tendrils bring growth, after all. It sounded like my Marian.

When I think of Marian, I think of her physical presence. She was always a dancer—trim, balanced in nuance, ready to spring into movement whether with her mind or her body. I remember her blouses with soft ruf