The here and now

The posts started popping up in my Facebook feed, in astonishing number, sometime Sunday after the Los Angeles Times published Melinda Welsh's essay in print and online.

Melinda is SN&R's founding editor. Her essay, “The Time I Have Left,” detailed with extraordinary insight and grace her journey with cancer.

The diagnosis, the decisions, the treatments and, then, news the cancer had not retreated. The word “terminal.”

On Facebook, friends and colleagues shared Melinda's essay, praising the longtime editor as a wonderful journalist, mentor and friend.

She is all of those things to so many people. She is all of those things to me. I've known Melinda for more than 20 years. She helped me start my career and through the years she's been a wonderful colleague, mentor and friend.

But it's too easy to slip into the “was.” She is a wonderful colleague, mentor and friend. And right now she is still here, doing important work. Just last month, she brought the Letters to the Future project to fruition. The collection of essays by notable writers, scientists, artists and thinkers tackled climate change in advance of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris. Published in this paper on November 19, it was a collaboration between more than 40-plus media outlets. All because of Melinda.

Read a longer version of Melinda's essay in this week's SN&R here. Feel sad (OK, devastated) and, then, please, continue to celebrate Melinda in the here and now.

She's not done yet.