Editor’s Note: Maine artist, architect, activist and author Emily Muir passed away last Wednesday night, at her home in Stonington. Writer Donna Gold offers this remembrance.

I did not know Emily Muir well. In fact, I spent only one day with her, about a decade ago, but I have thought back on that day often. It was this time of year; the snow was on the ground, the wind was up, I went to her house – and couldn’t find her. I knew it was the right house. There were sculptures outside, mosaics in the hallway, but though I pounded and shouted, I could not enter. Finally, I trudged through the snow, peering into window after window, and there she was, a small, old woman, so intent on the painting in front of her that nothing else mattered.

Having lived to be 99, having passed on just before the bombs she hated dropped on Iraq, knowing the fullness of her life, her passing is not something to grieve. Her life is something to honor.

Vibrant, enthusiastic, passionate, only at that first moment could I think of her as small. Emily fixed on me as intently as she had just fixed on her painting. Now I see that having known her, even just for an instant, was to know what being an artist is, for Emily grabbed with both hands onto what held meaning, and returned it with gifts to the world: eloquent paintings of the coast and its people, sunlit homes she designed and built on Deer Isle cliffs, strong letters to the editor about peace and education and the rights of children, novels and short stories about Maine.

Just last summer she gave us her crowning gift, a most delightful autobiography, “The Time of My Life,” a triumph of her spirit, filled with paintings. In it, Muir asked hard questions, like why make art?

“Mother used to think all art should be beautiful to give pleasure,” she wrote in the chapter, Adjustments, regarding her life after her husband, the artist Bill Muir, died. “But there are other gifts we need, too. We need to be shocked out of our complacency, awakened, made to laugh, and made to cry even, because the world needs our caring.” Again, in speaking of her life after Bill died, she wrote, “Yes I feel lonely. Nothing but lonely without Bill. … You have to learn to love itself, not just love a person or a place.”

And so she answered her question, why make art: “In a work of art, no matter how crude, the artist has poured out his feelings … he has a need to communicate himself to anyone who has eyes to see and a heart to listen. I know of no greater thrill than sharing a wonderful experience with another human being. It can be expressed in paint, in words, in silence, in action. But once shared, it is not soon forgotten.”

Having shared many a moment with many another human being, in paint, in words and in life, Emily Muir will not be forgotten.