I'm Christopher Leiden, and this is Open Source, with the last burst of wind in our sails,

the last gentle gaffaw from a listener we came to adore, the cartoonist Ed Corrin.

You knew Ed Corrin too, for those furry, critical characters he drew, and captioned portraits

of our general bemusement through a 60-year run in the New Yorker magazine.

His studio, it turned out, was in rural Vermont, where he'd got hooked on our public radio

shows over the years, finally, just a few years ago, we met the sheer joy of that man face-to-face.

Ed Corrin knew that the laws of entropy as he put it in conversation were not in his favor,

but he did not believe in dying, and in this case, I don't either.

Most of a year ago, in the late stages of treatment for inoperable lung cancer, he told

me he had withdrawn from hospice care because hospice framed its mission around death and

his passion, as he said, was life and living.

What I heard was not the sound of denial or evasion of anything.

I felt he was embracing a truth that I had felt from the start of our precious friendship,

Ed Corrin stood for the elusive strands of humanity that do not die.

The wonder of our conversation has been discovering oddly enough that we could talk about such things,

and so we did.

Producer Mary McGrath and I, visiting Ed and his wife Curtis, late in March, up in Mary's

ski country.

As we entered his studio this time, he was absorbed in reading a New Yorker profile of Milton

Glazer, the godfather of modern graphic design.

And what he and I share is a lot, which is that he's an artist.

He loves to draw.

...