On the afternoon of April 23, 2025, my best friend and partner of 43 years passed away at age 71 after struggling through a succession of acute medical challenges that, in the end, simply wore her body out. What really sucked, however, was how precipitous her final decline turned out to be. Up until the last two weeks of her life, the tight circle of friends and loved ones gathered around her care had every expectation of her being with us for a good season or two – & of us being able to sweeten the final turn of her strenuous but fruitful passage on this earth.

In life, Laura Renee Givens was an inspired fireball whose outsized personality, imaginative reach, and offbeat sense of humor defied any set of conventional expectations while propelling her to explore a diverse range of creative and artistic endeavors. Although best known for her innovative work as a digital artist, she also found recognition as the author of quirkily inventive science fiction and fantasy, and – while her stamina was up to it – as a serious player in Denver’s lively improv theater scene. Although she never quite made the “big time” commercially in any of these fields, Laura garnered the respect and admiration of many who did – not just on account of her talent, but for the pluck, resourcefulness, and keen enthusiasm she brought to any project. Most importantly, though, she was a good friend to all who entered her circle, no matter whether the relationship was professional or strictly personal.  It’s not that my bestie was blind to people’s smudges, but that once she let someone in as a friend or colleague, her constancy and good faith were as close to absolute as one could ever hope to see in a human being.

As in life, so in death – even if only as an echo … Laura’s body may have gone the way of all flesh, but something certainly remains of the creative energy she embodied in her person that continues to ripple through the world.  To be sure, there is the writing and artwork she left behind, but likewise – if more subliminally – the impress she left by her sheer presence on the people around her, particularly those she worked with in different capacities through a long and varied career.

All that said, it’s not my intention here to gloss up the fertile complexity of my partner’s life with a summary list of highlights and the usual hagiographic flourishes. (As it is, I may have gotten dangerously close …) Laura was emotionally complicated, as many creative people are, and not always easy to get along with. Yet she was possessed of an uncommon light that still burns brightly for those of us who knew her, even if only as reflected in conscious memory and in the subtler realm of our dreaming. In her absence, she remains remarkably present – and it’s just that sense of discarnate proximity that I mean to touch on here with a couple of poems I’ve written since her passing.

 I finished this first one on the morning of what would have been Laura’s 72nd birthday, a little less than a month after she passed – just in time to read it at a memorial sendoff and celebration of life organized by a group of our friends. It is addressed to one whose eyes and ears are past being able to read or hear it, yet whose gaze persists to palpably haunt the speaker’s own:

BELOVED – for Laura G, in memoria

Your wide eyes are the only light I know
from extinguished constellations … (Pablo Neruda)

This life
            like a wisp of cloud
Bleeding into an infinite blue sky

And yet so much more
                                   how
A beloved's presence can abide
Beyond death
                     like ancient starlight

Bearing the impress of stars long bygone
In a kind of timeless perpetuity

So your gaze continues to fill my horizon
Like moonlight filtering through the predawn mist

Or a persistent echo
                               at the edge of hearing
In the interstice between memory and dreams

As evanescent as a cloud taking shape and disappearing in the space of a summer afternoon, such is human life. And yet, as Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hahn often liked to point out, while the cloud might seem to disappear, it never really ceases to exist, but undergoes the various transformations of its watery essence – rain mist, snow, etc. – as part of a vast planet-wide cycle that, among other things, sustains the very possibility of life on this Earth. Indeed, it takes only a little reflection to be able to envisage traces of that cloud almost everywhere we look, including our own bodies and just about everything we do.

By holding up the cloud as an example, this much venerated teacher was making a point about the fundamental nature of our own existence in all its humanly multidimensional complexity. Laura’s ashes will nourish the soil of the mountain valley where I’ll be spreading them later this year, but in the meantime and well beyond, her imprint will be felt across many human neuroscapes, both through her art and the mediation of conscious and subliminal memory. The embodied person as we knew her may be no more, but her presence persists in these rippling traces of her character and creative energy – a little like the light of a long-spent star reaching us from beyond the event horizon of deep space …

And yet, and yet … For all that, there still remains the acute sense of personal loss that typically takes over a person’s inner world on the death of someone dearly loved. That has certainly been true of my own experience in these early months, especially during the first weeks while I was writing this poem. There’s little in the poem itself, however, to allude to such feelings of sorrow directly, allowing them to emerge contextually from between the lines. What stands out, rather, is the speaker’s bemusement at the beloved’s transformation – no longer warmly, personally present as she was while alive, but reduced to the rippling traces of a life that has run its course, to be recomposed in this world only within the scope of memory, dream, and imagination. If anything – for the bereaved, at least – the beloved is liable to become most acutely present precisely on account of the void left behind, an absence so intensely felt that it takes on palpable substance and gravity, enough at times to bend one’s entire subjective universe around the ache and sense of deprivation. The fact that life itself must inevitably move on, ultimately indifferent to our human feelings, only casts a pall of isolation over this all-consuming grief, redoubling its force back onto the heart of the bereaved. – On my heart, certainly, in what is still early days; as voiced in the following poem, which came to me during the second month after Laura’s passing:

ECHO – for Laura G

But for this ache inside me
Would not this
                       rolling world 
Have swallowed you entirely under 

With the seamless indifference
Of a broad flowing river  
                                     moving on
                                     and on

And on
            but for this empty space
Where once you sat so comfortably

And the impress of your beating heart
Still resonates
                      an echo
More real than any mere memory -?-

Finishing up, I want to offer yet one more poem to balance out the picture, lines that virtually fell into my lap a few days ago as I was working on this piece. It’s the straight goods, telling exactly what it’s been like to carry my bestie’s impress so deeply in heart … For all that is painful, there is also tremendous consolation:

CIRCLE OF TWO – for Laura G

I hold out my arm sideways
As if to give you a little hug

As I used to do
                       sitting beside you
                       on the bed or couch
Just the two of us

                           sharing a moment
                           talking
Or watching a movie as you loved to do

And I can still feel the round curve of your shoulders
And the warmth of your body next to mine

It’s precious little
                           and yet so much
That I hope never to lose

Nor the bright timbre of your irreplaceable voice
When I hear you call out Coli!
                                             like a bell
From somewhere beyond the sky

Also, a sample of Laura’s art, a digital piece that really resonate with how I’ve come to envision her omni-dimensional arrival back into the ocean of Being …

Copyright © 2025 Nicole A Spencer. All rights reserved.