And then it occurred to me that in a way, Big Foot’s death might be a good thing. It had freed him from the mess that was his life. And it had freed the other living creatures from him. Oh yes, suddenly I realized what a good thing death can be, how just and fair, like a disinfectant or a vacuum cleaner. 
Science tells us that the “grey zone” between life and death is a mysterious place. There’s a singular point at which we are not one thing or another. Or rather we are both. alive and dead. And in that moment, between the two binaries, sometimes just sometimes we turn ourselves into Schrödinger’s cat, who may not only be alive or dead, but maybe every quantum possibility that exists in life with the universal wave function, including the possibility, where we are chatting in a communal kitchen, in Longyearbyen at one in the morning.
She had thought, in her nocturnal and suicidal hours, that solitude was the problem. But that was because it hadn’t been true solitude. The lonely mind and the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything. But amid pure nature (or the “tonic of wildness” as Thoreau called it) solitude took on a different character. It became in itself kind of connection. A connection between herself and the world. Between her and herself.