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SURIA CLARKE: Sunny, Vivacious, Irreverent

 

Suria Clarke's first name means "the shining one" or "the sun" in Sanskrit, and it was as if her whole life was about living the promise of her name. She was tall and vivacious, and somehow "she never went unnoticed," said her friend Selinde Dulckeit.

She was also "quite irreverent, whether she was talking to the C.E.O. of a company or the mailman," Ms. Dulckeit said. The two women knew each other in Brussels, where they lived before they both moved to New York. When Ms. Clarke died, she had just started a job as a vice president for media relations at eSpeed, a division of Cantor Fitzgerald at the World Trade Center.

Ms. Clarke, 30, had an appetite for life, for food, for wine. On a trip to Italy with Ms. Dulckeit, the two friends fell in love with the local Tuscan wine. Ms. Clarke just had to have some to take home to Brooklyn Heights. So they bought two huge bottles of wine, almost 90 liters.

But when they got home they had to find a way to decant it. They needed 90 empty bottles. So they started drinking. "We had to drink a lot of wine," remembered Ms. Dulckeit.

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From "Profiles in Grief" of The New York Times