In Memory of Larissa Keet

In hearing that Larissa Keet’s life had come to an end, I instinctively remembered the last time I saw her. I think this must happen with each of us when we hear about the death of someone that we know and love, trying to remember the details of what we don’t realize is to be the last time. What were we talking about? Laughing about? Hoping for? Planning? How I wish now that I had been paying more attention then, more focus, more gratitude, more awareness. What I do remember as if it were yesterday was her genuine appreciative joy and boundless energy. And how quickly she moved me from a place of sadness about the many wounds in our society to a place of meaningful possibility. She did this so seemingly effortlessly and authentically, reminding me that this was a woman who had been working most of her 65 years of life for peace. Whether peace between friends, in my home town of Los Altos or the mountains of Armenia-Azerbaijan or the sacred lands of Jerusalem. She held a vision of our common humanity that was so clear that I think even I could catch a glimpse. Thank you, Larissa, for your service, commitment and love. May your vision continue to live through each of us.

More about Larissa Keet’s life is excerpted below from an article circulated by Los Altos Voices for Peace.

Local Peace Leader from SF Area Dies in Kenya

Larissa Keet, a longtime Palo Alto-area peace and environmental activist, died after she was hit by a truck while crossing a street in Nairobi, Kenya, on January 13. She was in Kenya to attend a meeting of the World Social Forum.

Keet, 65, had lived in Los Altos Hills, with her husband Aubrey. They had been married 42 years.

Keet was a speech and language teacher in the Palo Alto Unified School District for many years and a graduate of the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. She was also active in many local groups, including Acterra, Hidden Villa, the Foundation for Global Community and one of its subgroups, Valley of the Hearts Delight. She was also active with the Raging Grannies of the San Francisco Peninsula and Los Altos Voices for Peace.

Debbie Mytels of Palo Alto, a close personal friend, noted that Keet became a specialist in conflict resolution and participated in several international trips with the Compassionate Listening Project, bringing together people in world trouble spots such as Israel/Palestine — where she helped with the “living Room Dialogues” between Arabs and Jews — and Armenia/Azerbaijan, among others. She attended many international conferences, including the first Beijing Conference on Women in the 1980s.

“Hundreds of people locally were touched by the life of this beautiful, vibrant woman — and her 65 years on this Earth were simply too short,” Mytels said. Another close friend and a founding member of the Foundation for Global Community, Len Traubman said of Keets, “She traveled the world to be where there were gatherings of people, especially of women — to be where progress was being made, to be where she needed to be to help things move forward. She was a woman of a new world, a world between where an old (way of) life is dying and a new world that’s not yet been born. She saw herself as a midwife to the world.”

Keets is survived by a sister Barbara Goldblatt and nephew Neil Goldblatt of Denver and niece Sheri Gellman of Connecticut.

–Don Kazak and Jay Thorwadson