(no subject)

gryphons_lair, Diane Echelbarger, died peacefully today in hospice. *

We were never very close, but I've known her since I was fifteen--basically half my life, at this point--and I first met her in person when I was seventeen, the first time I went to an SF convention. That was my first time meeting people from online fandom--the Lois McMaster Bujold Mailing List--in person. A bunch of us were there because Lois was guest of honor. I went to all of Lois's programming, and sat dumbstruck in her presence chewing on a coffee stir in a small-group chat session. But there was no such silence with the Listies I met that weekend; I co-hosted the big Listie room party. They were My People, and had been for years already, through most of my high school years.

Diane and I were never very close, but she was part of my fandom-family in a way that's sort of hard to explain if you weren't on the List between 1996 and 2002, maybe impossible to explain if you're not in fandom. She was one of the people who kindly and gently and infinitely bookishly brought me up from the awkward and undersocialized fifteen-year-old I was when I joined the List to, well, at least an early version of the me I am today. I owe a very great debt. I will miss her.

I will say, because you are the people to whom I need not preface this with an apology for being silly or irrelevant: fairestcat called to give me the not-altogether-unexpected news, and I assured her that I was all right, and I was very calm for ten or fifteen minutes, and then it occurred to me that I didn't know if Diane had gotten to read the forthcoming Ivan book, and that was when I started to cry. (She did get to, as it happens. I want to be comforted by that but I just wind up thinking about everything else she did miss, will miss, will have missed.)

* Fuck cancer. Fuck it.