Farewell Marian Labonte

This is a short eulogy that I gave at the memorial service for my longtime friend, Marian. The picture above is the two of us from drop-in time, taken on her iPad, a photo her son sent me when he was cleaning up her tech. There is also a short obit in the local newspaper.

Marian was, as we say in my family, a hot ticket.

I met her when I was living in Bethel with Ola O’Dell, who some of you might know, another woman who Got Things Done.

She was always up to something, had a plan or a scheme, and had something she wanted YOU to be up to also. She would point at you with her, scaly hands with nicely painted nails, and tell you what your part in all of her schemes was going to be.

I mostly became friends with Marian through her visits to the library. Not only was she a voracious reader (and we liked some of the same books, so she was there with the suggestions, though she was a little less torture-avoidant than I was so I always had to watch it) and sometimes Scrabble player, she always came in to get help with one of her many tech devices. I knew her from her first flip phone, through her first smart phone. I was there when she got a Kindle, an iPad, a second smart phone to replace the first, a second Kindle, and her Apple watch which she would show off to me because she loved that it had a Snoopy watch face; her love of dogs was pure and extremely inclusive. I first met Todd over text (and Zoom) because we were on Marian’s Tech Support Team, trying to support her schemes while quietly not letting her get too into the weeds.

But she wasn’t all tech gadgets, Marian also loved Vermont and driving around it in her little Miata. She was always planning a ride over this mountain or that gap or that other back road and while I think I only got roped into one of them—feeling all the while like I was on Mister Toad’s Wild Ride in Wind in the Willows—she was always going somewhere and doing something and would send me emails and later texts about her trips.

Most importantly, she was all about helping other people. She was a huge accessibility advocate (maybe you didn’t know this but her hearing wasn’t great – I was always slightly hollering when we spoke at the library) and she successfully hassled the library into getting captions for their Zoom book group. She hassled the movie theater into getting live captions for their movies, and one of the things we would do at drop-in time at the library was track down phone numbers for local news stations (and Netflix, do you know how hard it is to find a phone number for Netflix?) so that she could hassle them about the news not having proper captions. She always wanted me to tell people about caption phones, cheaper hearing aids from Costco, and live captions at the movies. She helped so many people in this community get access to the things they deserve. She was always swinging by Veggie Van Go and would leave me a random bag of carrots or apples or a box of water (?) saying “Us single women need to stick together”

She was part of my day to day life and I will miss her at the library and miss her emails and texts. She texted like a teenager. I’ll read you one of the last texts she sent me which I think gives you a great sense of Marian (I’d just sent her a Halloween card a few weeks previous)

Hi J: What a lovely card. And the stamps! I’ve been trying to clean up my house. It’s getting there.[handclap emoji] Did you ever get your kid’s kindle? Do you love it? My replacement kindle is in a coma. Hoping you can bring it up to where it should be. Sorry I missed you again today. I’ve been sleeping a lot, also. Hope you & Jim are fine. [double heart emoji][dog emoji][handclap emoji][thumbs up emoji][warm smile emoji]

Marian was my friend and a force of nature. I will miss her.

missing my friend Brad.

goodbye brad

Sorry for the total radio silence. My year is going fine. Well, my year is going well except for the things that are not going well. The New Year was wonderful. Party with friends. Downtime with Jim after a busy couple of months. Lovely weather. Tasty food. Good movies. Came back to work at MetaFilter to find that a moderately well-known user had died. This is a difficult thing in Internet communities, in a different way than real-life communities. Many people hadn’t known Andrew’s real name and knew very little about him other than what he had shared on the site. He had made a not-funny-in-hindsight comment about faking his own death a month earlier. Strange times. I spent a chunk of New Years’ Day swapping facebook messages with his 26 year old widow and talking to other members of the community. It was slow going, but we worked through it. We have a procedure on MetaFilter for what to do when people die. It works okay. I hate having to use it.

Then, three days later I got the staggering news that my internet-and-real-life friend Brad Graham had died. In his sleep. Of natural causes. He was my age. Another internet-and-real-life friend sent me an email when he found out and saved me from having to learn the bad news on Twitter. And it’s a different sort of difficult. Brad was one of those people who everyone loved, everyone wanted to spend more time with, everyone could pass on a joke he’d told them but say “but I can’t really tell it like Brad could.” He had “Break Bread with Brad” events at a lot of occasions when he’d travel — in San Francisco for Fray Day, in Austin for SXSW — and it was the best opportunity to get to know other people, nerds like us. I was luckier than a lot of internet people in that I’d actually gotten to spend some real-life time with Brad, at his house when I was driving x-country and at a very small wedding of dear friends. Brad was so popular and fun to be around that even though he made you feel like the center of his universe, it was tough to get much alone-time with him and I think I’d had more than most. The MetaTalk rememberance thread filled up with people who haven’t been on MetaFilter in any real way for years. People who barely blog anymore wrote moving pieces about him on their website.

Like most people, I went digging through my old emails just to read some of the things he’d said. I read about my contribution to the Bradlands Underpants Drive to contribute to Katrina victims in a Bradlike way. I read about the time I’d put his cell phone number in my calendar and then uploaded it to the internet and he’d found it by Googling his own cell phone number. I went so far back in my emails, I actually found a time (that I had forgotten) when I had a separate email folder for “internet friends” and email from Brad was in that folder, from 2002. He fixed a typo for me, I don’t even remember what for, but he called me “darling” when he told me he fixed it.

I haven’t been writing anything else because I’ve been missing Brad, someone I’d realistically see in person once a year at most usually less, and it seemed wrong to write about it and wrong to not write about it. A bunch of us are collecting donations for a memorial for him for the theater where he worked. If he was someone you knew, please consider a donation. I know I’ll remember him for many different things: good hugs, good advice, good stories, a wicked sense of humor that was always edgily appropriate (I think? for me?) and a magnetic personality wrapped up in a funny sweater. Oh and I guess he invented the word “blogosphere” I had no idea.