“Sophie came into the world as herself…”

July 30^th. It’s Sophia’s birthday.

As always, I find myself thinking of the parameters of her life: birth, death, life’s cosmic bookends in this sublunary world.

How does one define a life? Sophia had 22 years of it, 22 years of life. Keats had 25. Dante’s Beatrice, 24.

The numbers tell us nothing.

And everything.

So young. So young. It hurts to think of it.

How does one measure the dimensions of a life? No scale is large enough, no scale true enough. We get lost in a thicket of adjectives trying to explain it.

“Tragic” is often applied to the death of the young. Now, there’s an adjective. What would Sophia think of it…

Some weeks ago, I reread Sophia’s first collection of poems, Antiquity (which was written when she was 13 and 14). Sophia had conceived of the collection as being written by a middle-aged scholar, Professor A. B. Miriam Thyme.  In her introduction to the collection, Sophia notes that (and yes, Thyme/Time, there’s an amused Sophie glance in the play on words):

“The lady in question is 51-year-old A. B. Miriam Thyme, author of Thyme’s Mythology, a standard text on ancient myth and religion. Childless and aging, in her mind her life has become bound up with the Gods and heroes to whom she has devoted her life. It would be better for the reader to view the poems as the products of the Professor’s imagination rather than mine as she is much more integrated into the collection than I shall ever be and has a much more appropriate tragic life story.”

In retrospect, “tragic life story” gains an added reverberance. Painful, in light of what was to come. Poignant, in the thought of young Sophie looking ahead to a life of possibility just set foot upon.

But would Sophia claim that adjective for herself? “Tragic.” Would she apply it to herself, wish it appended to her life?

No. Never.

After all, this is the Sophia who, in hospital, wrote: To face the truth is the essence of courage. To face death is the first lesson of philosophy” on top of the page wherein she detailed her wishes in the case of her death. Hers was a disciplined mind.

So, “tragic”? No. She would reject the self-drama of it, utterly.

True, her life had such promise, such potential, that was not able to reach fruition: the life unlived, the children unborn, the books unwritten. Is this terrible? Of course it is. The thought that, as Shakespeare states in his sonnets, “thou amongst the wastes of time must go” is painful beyond measure.

However, I think Sophia would say to us that it is not, in fact, promise unfulfilled which is tragic, but promise betrayed—and believe me, this is something Sophie never did. Sophie never betrayed the ideals that animated her worldview, the principles by which she lived her life. The qualities laid out on the splashdown page of this website—Courage, Truth, Wisdom, Beauty—are not listed there as “nice sentiments” (Sophie would scorn the thought). They were lived. They were lived her entire life.

There was a remarkable coherence to Sophia’s character, both within and across time. Little 4-year-old Sophie who took on the mantle of Prince Caspian (from C. S. Lewis’ Narnia stories), identifying with his quest to battle evil and so protect the beauty and truth of Narnia, became the courageous and composed young woman who could face the thought of death so steadfastly (no fanfare, no grand pronouncements, she just did it).

Sophia was exactly who she was meant to be, and she remained true to the essence of it every day of her life.

A dear friend who has known Sophia since she was a small child said to me recently that: “Sophie came into the world as herself, learnt what she needed to learn, and then left.”

There is a weight of truth, a fractal particularity, to this one-line summation.

Sophie came into the world as herself…

How grateful I am that you did, Sophie. How grateful I am that you came to me.

It is terrible that you died. It would be more terrible, however, if you had never lived. Oh, that would be an incalculable—an irredeemable—absence.

It’s your birthday, Soph.  Thank you for sharing your 22 years with me. Thank you for being the “you” who lived it so truly.

Loving you always, beautiful child. . .

 ***

The poet asked to add a page to Sophia’s Notebook for 2025 is noted Australian poet, Peter Boyle.

Click here for details.