A Late Tribute

I miss my friends Amy and Kate. One of the last times we had a hang, just the three of us, we ended up walking though Oakland Cemetery. I found on the ground an American Chestnut pod, something neither of them had seen before. They were surprised at the spiky thing I broke open to show them the three withered nuts inside. We talked about what had happened to American Chestnut trees, and how shortsighted mismanagement of a disease by a government agency had led to almost all of the trees being cut down. Amy and I were both working for the CDC by that time, and Amy made a dark joke about mismanagement by a government agency never being the case with human diseases. None of us laughed, but it was funny, back in the fall of 2018. Amy was funny, and I hope Kate still has a sense of humor when I get to see her again, if I get to see her again.

I should have known my old friend Amy was dead. The last email I have from her is from the end of May 2021. The internet now tells me she passed away just a few months later.

The thing that we both treasured about our friendship was that we only hung out about once every year or so, and every time it was like no time had passed. Amy was another of my friends that are fiercely independent women, and again the end came from a combination of COVID and lung cancer. When I met Amy she smoked the French unfiltered cigarettes that had been popular in the punk and goth scenes of the early 90’s. I smoked cloves, but never regularly, and of course gave them up entirely when I was ready to make babies. Amy did switch to filters at some point, but I don’t know that she ever was able to kick nicotine entirely until near the end.

Amy and I met in 2003 through livejournal, where she went by thermidor. We were both part of the community of women, most of us librarians or information science workers, who really did build the internet. Amy went to library school in the UK, I went to Boston, and we both loved fan fiction, information science, and talking shit on the internet while simultaneously building it through work on things like the first social media platforms (all the way back to the BBS days) and collaborative efforts like editing Wikipedia, or tagging up communities like Metafilter and Livejournal. At the time we met Amy was disentangling herself from a messy divorce from an alcoholic, and I was disentangling myself from my dad, who was also a messy alcoholic. A lot has been written by and for those whose personal hell is addiction and alcohol, but not as much, I don't think, by those of us who get the by-blow hell of leaving those addicts behind. Getting an alcoholic permanently out of your life in exhausting, and we could talk about that exhaustion.

We also shared life-long struggles with depression in a way that’s hard to explain to those who don’t share the same sort of problem. The internet, and our love of information, made it easy to close off the world and create our own bubbles of comfort inside our homes that were simultaneously easy to enjoy and intellectually wonderful, while at the same time being psychologically and physically damning in the long run.

Our paths started to diverge when I had kids, something Amy never wanted and had a hard time understanding sometimes. The only real argument we ever had was about breastfeeding at work, and she apologized to me in person later, though I wasn’t angry with her. We didn’t grow up in an era when women older than us had the option to better integrate child care and work. Both of us struggled professionally as we had gotten library science degrees at the exact time our profession was needed more than ever but was being dismissed. We were both employed in academia at one point when one of Amy’s employers said to her “I just don’t understand why we need to have librarians now that we have GALILEO.” That employer was an actual dean. That the school the dean worked at no longer exists is cold comfort, but it gives you an idea where our profession was twenty years ago.

Amy marched with me in the lantern parade the first year the Beltline was paved - I had been marching from the start, and convinced Amy to come once there was a proper sidewalk to come to. Her hands swole up after, because the stick I handed her for her hand-painted lantern came from that sidewalk construction, and turned out to be fiberglass or something. Amy never marched with me again, but we would go foraging for pecans along the Beltline with Amy’s room mate Kate just a few years later when Kate also moved down to Atlanta from Boston.

When I found out about Amy’s death, I reached out to Kate to find that she has been diagnosed with an early form of dementia following a severe bout of COVID just a few months ago. Kate is also an information science worker, one of the women who built the internet, and one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. Kate’s caretaker says she’s hopeful that Kate may be able to exit hospital rehab in a few weeks, and I’m going to try to visit.

I’m going to try and reconnect with a lot of people I haven’t seen since 2019, now that it’s 2023. If you haven’t seen me in a few years, and you want to get dinner or coffee, please let me know. I’m going to try and start seeing people again. I’m sorry we were out of touch. We’ve all been through so much since the quarantine. Everything is different, and some of you aren’t there anymore. I don’t know anyone who got out with at least a couple of scars.

The pandemic is over, and it will never be over. The tragedy is still finding me, still finding my friends. Kate was one of the most brilliant catalogers, working on some of the most prominent commercial collections at the turn of the century. Although most will never know it, if you clicked on any kind of tag today, it probably would link back to, or touch in some way, something Kate cataloged in the move from analog to digital. Amy was so good at information management that she made it into the highest clearance at the CDC, the one that gets you into the underground panic room. How can I explain to people younger than me, including my kids, what it was like to know some of the smartest women of my generation, members of the information science workforce, who were some of the first to connect online in the late 80’s and early 90’s?

I won’t be able to tell my kids any of Amy or Kate’s jokes for years. They were all too dirty, though Kate would be quick to correct me and say “dirty implies shame, use the word adult”.

You two were two of the best adults I knew in Atlanta. I miss you.