Sylvia Lewis

Silkmoth Cat🐈

Me: you don’t have all the facts.

Officer: which are?

My best friend, the woman I loved for 13 years, was a fic writer in the middle of an especially long piece. She updated on a schedule and had for years. She had a small, but loyal following.

And then she died out of nowhere. One day we were laughing, the next she was in a coma, 3 days later she was dead. She hadn’t been ill and to this day we don’t know what took her. She was just gone.

I knew she had friends all over the world so I went into her email to see if I could find addresses and notify people after a week of blind grief. In her inbox were about a dozen concerned messages from her readers. I cried. I cried and cried and I responded to all of them, telling people she had passed.

And the messages kept coming. Those people spread the word and message after message came in, most of them addressed to me now, as I had given those original readers my contact info. There were words of comfort and grief and just every emotion imaginable in that scenario. I wrote back to them all, thanking them and comforting them.

For months after she died, during the worst of my grief, I had those messages. I had those people. And they had me. I really think I might not have made it to the other side without them.

So, the fact that you care? That you think of them? That these authors who became a presence in your world are missed when they aren’t there? It means something very real. On the off chance that the author did die? Anyone who has seen this post will find comfort during the loss of their friend or family member, knowing that you all exist. That they aren’t alone. That you CARE that the world now lacks their loved one.

So, yeah. I’ve seen this post and ones like it for years and wanted to share this story. I finally could today.

oh

my

god

Luckily I am the stubbornest human alive, ‘cause I never woulda finished otherwise. I didn’t know what I was doing, didn’t know the terms to look up how to do anything, I musta reinvented the wheel like eight times and it took ten months, BUT I DID IT.

Figured I’d suffered enough and would never do it again and now I’m on quilt #9 smdh

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I’m hyperventilating.

Holy shit. Holy SHIT.

This is INCREDIBLE.

Oh my god.

I’ve gotta go lay down holy shit look at this how do we just walk by other human beings every day and live our separate lives when there’s a person sitting next to you on the train or in line for coffee who goes home and makes things like this what even IS being human holy shit.