In memoriam

In memoriam for a women I never met.

We were a group of writers from all over the world: UK, US, Australia, Germany, Switzerland, Israel. All of us belonged to the International Women's Writing Group. That group puts writers who live nearby together so they can meet and talk about the writing.

In the mid 1990s, a geographically diverse group IWWG members, decided to meet on-line, far ahead of what exists today with Facebook. My first emails with the group was on a black screen with yellow letters.

We decided to write a project together: a collection of short stories with the characters intertwined.

First we selected a place: Camden Market in London. On a trip to London, I took photos and shared them with the other members. It was before the web with its Facebook, Instagram, etc.

Then we each developed a character and selected one of the other's characters.

Emails and stories went back and forth probably at least a couple of hundred of times, until we had them the way we wanted them.

The book above is the result.

Although we never did a second writing project, we became friends, sharing our successes and failures, happy moments and worries.

Janice Jakubowitcz was one of those women that I shared with sometimes regularly, sometimes less regularly. We both had daughters that meant the world to us. We almost met in person when I was visiting my daughter in Washington, D.C. and she was planning to take the train from Pennsylvania. Weather fouled our plans but it didn't stop our writing off and on. During this period we even chatted on the phone.

There are friends one has that it is possible to go a time with no contact and when the contact is renewed it was like it was the day before, only there's more to catch up. It can be true for email friends. I know if we lived in the same city we would have met often. 

Today, when I opened my email today the title of one of the other writer's in the group read "horribly sad news." The title was correct.

There is no point in saying it isn't fair when a good person suffers.

That she has no more health problems is a compensation for my loss. 

I wish her daughter courage in learning to live without her wonderful mother.