The Weight of Their Leaving

I woke up this morning with a heaviness in my chest.

It wasn’t grief exactly — or not only grief — but the sudden hollowness that follows when figures you’ve carried inside your imagination vanish. This weekend, the news came that Diane Keaton died. Already, tributes are pouring in: for her wit, her courage, her singular voice on screen.

Not long before that, we lost Jane Goodall, whose life spanned decades of fierce advocacy, gentle listening, a science that cracked open human arrogance by reminding us how wildness lives in us.

Losing them in the same season feels profoundly personal — as if these women embodied more than their public selves. They were constellations, models, moral imaginations. Their passing feels like more than a headline; it feels like disturbance in the air.

I knew Diane Keaton as a kind of rebel in plain sight.

Her face — the tilt of that hat, her candid lightness, the way she could carry melancholy and humor side by side — felt like a kind of permission. I watched her performances and saw a woman unafraid to be awkward, to change, to fail, to age. She was luminous not despite her flaws, but through them.

When an icon like that dies, history rushes in. We catalogue her work, retell her highlights, place her among the greats. But underneath that, there’s a quieter loss: the loss of possibility. The loss of someone who felt like a living emissary of what kind of woman a woman could be in art, in the public eye, in vulnerability.

She was at once brave and unassuming. She didn’t ask for adoration, but earned it. She made doors wider just by walking through them. That’s what the shock reminds me: that the women who most disrupt the world often do so with softness, with nuance, with an insistence on being more than we expected.

And then there is Jane Goodall.

To lose Jane is to lose a moral compass for our planet. Decades of witnessing — of bearing witness — made her voice and her presence a kind of oxygen in conversations about nature, about humanity’s place in the web of life. She invited us to see ourselves in chimpanzees, to feel kinship, to act in care.

This is a cultural moment that feels brittle.

We are living through times when women’s voices are contested, devalued, threatened. We watch stories in media about erasure, backlash, silencing. In that context, every loss feels amplified. Losing someone like Diane feels like a shrinking of possibility. Losing someone like Jane feels like a fracturing of witness.

We lose icons and they leave a kind of vacancy. But part of mourning them is not only remembering what they were, but asking: What will we do now? What stories will we carry? Whose seat do we try to hold open?

Grief is also a summons.

Maybe the reason the loss of powerful women feels so raw right now is because so few women of that stature remain. We depend on them disproportionately — for representation, for moral work, for imaginative possibility. When they leave, that dependency becomes glaring.

One thing I believe: grief and gratitude can coexist. So many are grieving Diane Keaton’s death. So many are grieving Jane Goodall’s absence. But so many are also deeply grateful for what their lives gifted us: templates of resilience, creativity, radical gentleness. Their legacies are not inert. They press on the present.

And in that pressing, they challenge us. They challenge me — to listen deeper, to act with more courage, to produce art and thought that does some small justice to the breadth of what they gave.

I think about the women who come after me.

When icons leave, we inherit their work, even more than their memory. The baton passes. The world needs more emboldened voices now than ever.