In Memorium

There is a very fine line between having your blog go dark for a day of mourning and not having the time to write anything anyway. It’s kind of like a lot of mid-20th-century art that way – it’s not so much the appearance of the thing as it is the intent behind it.

Last summer I was inducted into the UCF, a collective of bloggers and other folks online who share triumphs and tragedies, support, information, and no small amount of sarcasm, random digressions and the sort of friendly chops-busting that seems to have gone out of style in many places, alas. All I will say about it is that it is nice to find a corner of the internet that lives up the social networking hype that it was sold with way back when.

One of our members passed away over the weekend.

I had never met Wendy. I knew her as an icon, as words on a screen, and for that reason her passing probably hit the other members of the UCF rather harder than it did me. But she was welcoming to the new guy when I showed up, and she always had interesting things to say. And she passed the most important test of humanity that I know of – she was nice when she didn’t have to be and had nothing to gain by it.

And for that I will miss her.

As so many other UCFers have already said, fair winds and following seas, Wendy. The world is that much poorer for your absence.