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I only met her in person a couple of times (at Dragon Con), but she was my friend nonetheless. Internet friends can be real friends too. I knew her for 9 years.
We first met on a bulletin board for a little TV show called Firefly. That was in 2002 and very few people had ever heard of it, but a small group of fans fell in love. Of course, we were too small a group to prevent it from being cancelled, but we turned out to be big enough to get DVDs (unusual then for a show cancelled in its first season) and even a movie (Serenity). Susan was one of the people who was the heart and soul of the group.
Susan, known in fandom as 11th Hour, was one of the folks instrumental in promoting our little show through the art she created. She made guerrilla marketing posters and made them freely available to any fan who wanted to print them and post them. And the fans did post them everywhere we could. And the DVDs sold, then we bought more DVDs and pushed them to our friends and printed more of Susan's posters to get anyone to watch the DVDs. We were so successful they ended up making a movie to give us some closure to the Firefly story. They also ended up making a documentary about the fans.
In the years I knew Susan, we teased, we talked about deep things, we laughed, we made up jokes about how hot Nathan Fillion (the star of Firefly) was, we grieved the deaths of other friends, we celebrated my successes, her successes and the successes of other friends, we watched friends meet online and then get married in real life, we attended science fiction conventions and met in real life, and then just recently, she made my cry when I found out that cancer had claimed her life at far too young an age.
I wasn't an artist when I first met her, but she encouraged my early efforts and helped me move in a new direction in my life. Without the encouragement of my friends like Susan, I might never have perservered past that first art class. It especially meant a lot to me that she encouraged me as she was a professional artist. Now my art is in the permanent collection of the Longwood University Visual Arts Center and hangs in the Math Department. Susan helped me to believe in me. And so I was able to do things I had never really thought were possible. The best friends are like that, people who help you grow.
This week is the 20th anniversary of the World Wide Web (http://www.wired.com/...), so it is fitting that today I honor the memory of a friend I never would have met if it hadn't been for the Internet. And of course as the Internet brought the Firefly fans together as a group, it was also the means through which we heard of her death and brought many people who had drifted away over time back to the group to pay their respects.
And just because Susan would want me to say it, "Nathan Fillion is so hot he caused Global warming." And if you haven't watched Firefly, you should.