Rest in Piece Cathy

Long time readers of my blog may know who Cathy Seipp is. She was a writer and blogger whose work I stumbled upon over two years ago. I wrote a post about her last June commemorating an anniversary of sorts for her - the fourth anniversary of her diagnosis with inoperable lung cancer. She lost that battle today.

Her blog (click on her name above for a link) was? is? one of the many I read every time there was a new post. I commented a few times on various posts. She talked about a number of things politics, healthcare, life, children. She was always brutally honest and she seemed to enjoy the spirited debates that would happen in the comments section of each post. In fact, she is responsible for my greatest high as a blogger so far. Just click on this post from last July and check out the commenter. It was the first (and so far only) time that someone I considered a "big" blogger not only read my blog but felt moved to comment. Lately though, her posts had been less frequent and were more and more dealing with trips to the hospital, pain pumps etc. Every time the RSS feed told me there was a new post, I dreaded clicking the link, because I knew that one day it would be a post from Maia (her daughter) or a friend telling us she had died.

There are a number of tributes to her. Her blog's most recent posts were written in the last few days by family and friends to serve as updates. Just read the comments on those and you can get a sense of who she is. You could also read this piece by Amy Alkon or this one by Susan Estrich . One of the more interesting ones is a piece in the LA Times which she often lampooned for falling into political correctness a bit too much.

My thoughta and prayers are with Maia and her family. There loss is felt by more people than they know.