Memorializing a friend

PJ, Adirondack mountains, 2007

The final entries are up on my friend Patricia Jempty's blogs, The Plog and Word in the Woods, with the headline: Jan. 23, 1954-June 28, 2014.

Her husband wrote that she passed away, peacefully, in her sleep, in the early hours of June 28 in hospice in Brooklyn, surrounded by her friends and her family – her husband, Marty, and her children, Mariel, Mark and Harry.

In a post that I wrote two days later, On losing a friend to leukemia, I wrote about how our lives and our battle with leukemia were so similar in many ways; she even called us dopplegangers.

I still expect her to comment on my blog posts. We would each cheer the other up, sympathizing and making light about all the unexpected and often debilitating effects of graft vs. host disease along with Ann, who battles on.

I figure Marty will eventually remove her blogs, but I wanted to keep her on that list. If you are reading this in bloodspot, just look to the right where I have the photos of my children and there you'll see Patricia in a pose that says it all, seeming to lift a heavy rock in the Adirondack Mountains in February, 2007.

She did indeed have a heavy burden on her shoulders, but she carried it with a smile.