The Growing List

Margaret Secara (Pierce)
"Maggie"

A friend died unexpectedly Friday night. She and I were chatting on facebook a couple of hours earlier (giggling over pictures from us with friends at a party in 1977 which she had uncovered) and a couple of hours later her husband heard a thud from the next room. He found her on the floor, CPR and 911. She was pronounced at 11P.

A friend who was in the pictures notified me Saturday morning before it was announced on Maggie's webpage that afternoon – after her family had been notified across many time zones. Within the next few hours over 500 people responded.

Grieving requires simple honestly. First about the shock, then about the loss, but for me, it has had to move into a celebration - say that name, tell the tales, keep them alive in memory, and introduce them to people who will never get to meet her. It keeps her alive for just a bit longer.

And grief is best processed in the sharing with the other people who know that specific loss.

Nan, he friend who notified me, made a particularly on-target comment. She said that once we got together for fun - parties, romance, music, movies, tv-watching parties, 1970s dalliances in social drugging, drinking, events. Then we started getting together for weddings and births and anniversaries of things known only to us.

And now we get together for grieving, memorials, and funerals.

Maggie Secara (Pierce) was a life changer. She helped me edit my first novel before it went to a publisher. She helped me name it. I met her shortly before she went to work for Harlan Ellison, but suddenly I became beneficiary to tickets to events that came her way when Harlan chose not to attend. She became an author after doing her time as secretary, assistant, and editor with three books available in the genre she loved - romantic fantasy. She became a familiar presence and Renaissance Faires, SCE, pagan observances, and similar function for costumes and weapons and food and drinking and candles and laughter... Yeah. Like that.

She re-entered my life on Facebook a few years ago and we exchanged news and opinions several times a week.

So I have another name to add to my acknowledgments to SONG OF ORPHANS - the book she helped edit 1977 and helped with a new name (rather than VALU: INITIATE, my first choice). She worked prodigiously on my typo-laden first draft. And another name on the list of people I've lost in the last few years. Nan is right - it is how we come together now.

And we were talking a couple of hours earlier.