I want to write the life of @spiletta42. She died one year ago, July 1, 2018. I want to write her story, the memoir she would have written, had she ever thought herself worth such a thing. But I am not an author, like she was. I am not crafty with words, and able to make a person feel the depth of emotion that was her life. Her kindness and caring can not simply be contained in those two words. They need to be felt. They were felt, by me, by Fandom, by the people in the town where she lived. No-one who knew her would tell you otherwise.
But this is beginning to sound like all those obituaries and empty things people always say when a person dies. So I will tell you about the one person who didn’t like Spi. Many years ago, Spi followed her dream, and opened a tack store. Spi loved horses, probably more than she loved G-d, if that’s not blasphemous to say. She opened the tack shop as a way to be surrounded daily by the thing she loved, and she gave up a lot in order to do so. She had a business partner, whose name I was never told. This women was sadly not of the highest moral standings, and as a result Spi lost not only the store, but her ability to do any other job but the one she hated, though was excellent at. Despite this Spi continued to live her life with joy. She developed a perpetual fear of the telephone, which she was able to overcome if it meant helping a friend through a difficult emotional time.
Spi lived in a strange town, with strange people. Good, kind, wonderful people, but strange. She would share stories of her daily life, and pick out the best bits to fuel the plots of her ever increasing library of fanfiction. Spi was an accountant by profession, and an author by desire. Spi was a nerd, in a very 80s sense of the world. Her house was decorated with all the things she loved, and a wide range of things they were: Archeology in general, but specifically the Aztec, the Maya and the Egyptians. Cephlopods held a large part of her heart, especially the Opabinia; Science Fiction, of course. She subscribed to Asimov, Archeology, Scientific American, and a few others I can not recall. Not only did she subscribe to them, but read every article, in every issue. Spi had boxes of index cards, on which she would write notes from anything she read that was interesting, and possibly useful in her writing. She spent a year building a custom floor to ceiling bookshelf with exactly spaced shelving for various types of media, so that her space would be as organized as possible. She loved diet coke, though she stopped drinking it years ago.
These are all some facts about who she was, but they are not enough to tell of the affect she had in the world. I know I am not the only one whose life was deeply and profoundly changed by knowing her. She was there to support me when making some of the hardest decisions of my life. She was unwavering in her belief that no matter how hard or bad things are, Life is better than not. I know that her belief has saved at least one person, but that is not my story to tell.
Spi was one of my first true friends, and though I only knew her for 15 years, and only met her in person once, I struggle to think of what my life would have been without her in it. I feel as though she has always been a part of my life, and though she is gone, she always will be.
Torah teaches us that a soul comes to this world for a purpose, to bring light and goodness into the world, and to make it a garden where G-d will want to dwell. Spi definitely did that, and now her soul has returned to G-d where it can be glad of a job well done. A poem I think of, not one I know if I wrote myself or one I heard from someone when I was too young to have experienced the pain that death leaves:
Death, really a happy time
Painful for those left behind
