To Joey Francisco's Life and Treasured Memory

On Friday, the day "Nightmare on Query Street" started, I heard the news that a writer friend passed away.

I'm reeling, I'm in shock, and I'm writing this almost as a diary entry because I don't know how to stop my thoughts.

I haven't seriously cried in about three or four years (seriously, no books, no movies, no nothing) but I think, today, I might. Tears are coming.

Joey, you are (are) such a wonderful friend, I only wish I could have been a better one. Everything you went through, you handled it with such strength and joy and optimism, I can't comprehend it. You are an amazing mother, a loving one who fought to no end for your son and family.

What cruelty took you from this world? How can I describe how it feels to lose a loved one when, now that it has happened, I feel nothing at all? But the emotions are coming and it hurts, it hurts so badly. My throat burns. I'm shaking.

I remember your Southern voice, so peppy and springy, on the phone right before I boarded a plane to go to London this summer. I talked in one of those airport bookstores with you, I don't think I told you that. I miss you more than I can say. You have (have) so much to give to this world.

It was all so sudden and so unexpected. I wish I would have contacted you more and not when, as I later found out, it was too late. I should have sent something during those months of no interaction, and I just want to hear your voice again, hear you talk about your Evil Little Manuscript.

The reality is starting to sink in, that you're gone, and it's hard to handle.

Thank you for being such a wonderful friend, an incredible supporter, and a burning light to everyone who knew you. You fought and won against things most people would collapse upon; if only the end wasn't so unexpected, if you knew it might be coming, because you'd have fought it and you'd have won.

Here is Joey's obituary, and here is her guest book. To her family, I extend my utmost condolences and thoughts. A person I never met in reality affected me this much; I can't imagine how hard she, who was with you constantly, imprinted onto your souls. She will live on through those she loved.

Here's some lines:

"And this is the comfort of the good, that the grave cannot hold them, and that they live as soon as they die. For death is no more than a turning of us over from time to eternity. Death, then, being the way and condition of life, we cannot love to live, if we cannot bear to die.

"They that love beyond the world cannot be separated by it. Death cannot kill what never dies. Nor can spirits ever be divided that love and live in the same Divine Principle, the root and record of their friendship. If absence be not death, neither is theirs.

"Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas; they live in one another still. For they must needs be present, that love and live in that which is omnipresent. In this divine glass, they see face to face; and their converse is free, as well as pure.

"This is the comfort of friends, that though they may be said to die, yet their friendship and society are, in the best sense, ever present, because immortal."

 -- William Penn

And a song, which I can't listen to anymore without thinking of Joey. I feel it's the perfect song for us writers.

We won't let you die, Joey, nor your writing. Thank you so, so much, for being with us.