Letter to Debbie

Dear Debbie:

Time passes by and slightly changes the colour of grief. As you affected us in your life, you still do. Deb, I know you would be happy to hear this:

• I went to Asheville in April. I reconnected with your family. You know how important you were. It is a gift to have them back in my life.
• Ray took me out for breakfast. Remember how he would take us out for biscuits and grits before school? He is still the best hugger there is. He makes the world a better place with his hugging.
• I talk to Sue regularly. She is still one of the most amazing women I know. Always was, always will be.
• Sue kindly gave me the black sweater I knitted for you in 1986. I wear it in my workspace at home when I work late evenings. In the beginning it was sad, now it gives warmth and brings back memories.
• I have one of your framed and signed pictures from the mountains of North Carolina facing me when I wake up in the morning.
• Judith and I have re-established our friendship. We just spent three days in New York together. We played “Hey Jude” very loud in the hotel room and Judith demonstrated to me how you used to sing that song to her every time you spotted her in high school.
• We talked about you many many many times. Judith and I always cried together, still do. We also laughed and giggled at good memories and knew that you would be thrilled by us being together again. I introduced her to Chianti wine from Italy. We missed you there at the table.
• Danny is my friend on Facebook. We mail. I hope he can teach my boys to waterski one day when I bring them to North Carolina and Lake Lure. His girls are extremely beautiful.
• Miah is going to Paris. I hope she will make it to Oslo.
  

Thank you Debbie for the positive impact you still have on our lives.

Marna

My Kind of Girl...

"She wore a raspberry beret. The kind you find in a second hand store." Thanks for the great memories, Debbie. You were one in a million!

hey little buddy

i really miss you.

love bye.

m*

letter to Debra

Dear Debra:

I can't believe it's been a year. A long, strange, horrible, sad, hard year, not just for me but for so many people I know. But it's looking up — there's a new sense of optimism around here, and across the country as well, because of Obama, and I think you would have loved that. I wish you were here to feel it, to be warmed by it.

I didn't know you very well, not like most of the people on this blog. I knew you first as one of those two beautiful blonde girls always coming into the Red Herring with Bart for photo shoots. Then I knew you as one of his best friends, who he would travel with every year for fun, and I confess I was jealous of that for a while. Not because I didn't trust you two together, because I did, but because you seemed to have so much fun and I wanted to join in. It was only in the last five or six years that I got to know you as you, the electric talented laughing dancing celebrating always-late Debra, the flame to which so many moths were drawn. If we had met outside of Bart I like to think we would have been close friends, we might have made space in our lives for each other. But as it was I really enjoyed getting to know you, to see you change and grow with Frankie. You are my role model for graceful, non-"helicopter" parenting.

These are the things I remember about you today:

• Us talking about fiction. We were always swapping books, like Running With Scissors. You told me you loved it when people asked to use your photos on their book jackets Someday I had hoped one of yours would be on a book of mine. :-(
• You coming into our house carrying the 2-year-old Frankie under your arm like a rolled-up carpet, laughing
  
• The dinner party you had where you managed to get Kelly and other people to cook everything while you played sparkling host
• Your fearless fashion sense, which I always envied
• You at our wedding: You came straight from the airport and got up in front of the mic to "witness" for Bart, even though you were so, so sad, and tired, and the only reason you gave for why Bart should marry me was because I would "let him go on trips with us [you and Kate]!" And I am so sorry that I wasn't always gracious about that.
  

Debra, we will always love you, always miss you. And even though we weren't close, who you were as a woman, an artist, and a mother deeply inspired me, and I will carry little pieces of you in my heart and my head forever.

love Bonnie

I cry all the time.....

It's seems like yesterday I spoke to her on the phone....

...........it's hard to believe today is the day i received the terrible call...

The tears still find me when I think of her.

The sound of her voice always made my day better.

But now it makes me cry...

I love her...I miss her...

a lifetime ago

it's hard to believe it's been a year...it seems like a lifetime ago that we had her in our lives and it seem like yesterday that we could hear her laughing....or crying....or consoling or making us feel like the most special people in the world...
i haven't written anything on this blog yet, mostly because i can hardly explain how any of this feels, or has felt over the last year, and mostly because everything i ever seem to write about her hardly seems worthy of the love she gave us all...
so now, a year later, i just want to say that i still miss her terribly..and i know everyone feels the same way....and i know that feeling will never go away.
and i'm glad to feel the pain of losing her so powerfully now because it makes me feel closer to her. and it helps me remember the sound of her voice..
i'm not in town now, but i hear it's very hot there and i can imagine that she would have loved this time of year....celebrating frankie's birthday on a hot sf day....and getting ready for thanksgiving...and enjoying obama....:) and plotting when she would meet him...
dear debra, i love you and i miss you, and i have so much to talk to you about....please come visit soon....

love, kate

OBAMA WINS!

Debra would have loved loved loved this. In May of last year she outlined her secret plan for us to meet the Dalai Lama and encourage him to endorse Barack Obama. She knew someone who was going to see the Dalai Lama and we going to tag along and take photos, and ask him for the endorsement.

That would have been such a gas to see the Dalai Lama meet Debra.