Sharan Volin

I forgot to mention about the time my father was in the army, just after WW2. He was in the personal guard for Emperor Hirohito in Japan for a while. He was given a doll by the Emperor personally, which is still in the breakfront of their house.

Also, my cousin is here and reminded me of how my father was always filming movies when we were kids. He was joking about how they actually found one video filmed by someone other than him and how unusual that was.

I'm sure there's a lot more I can say about him. I'm going to try to say some things at his funeral tomorrow morning.

Well, apparently Justin's not going to Baycon and neither am I. I guess it's just as well since I really can't afford it right now. Plus, it looks like I may have to fly to Florida, because my cousin in Fort Lauderdale died last night, and the funeral is Sunday morning. Airfare is looking ridiculously expensive on such short notice right now, but if I can somehow find a flight I'll need someone to take care of Kitty and all his medications, and to check on chythar's cats, which I'm supposed to be doing this weekend. The usual cat sitter just moved out of state so I just hope Justin can help me out with this.

I've been meaning to post about this for a while, now, but life has been insanely busy since I found out. (not that it isn't always like that lately). But even though I have to get up in 4 hours to catch a plane back home to L.A. I can't sleep, so I thought maybe if I wrote about this it would take my mind off of other things and help.

A couple of weeks ago, my cousin, Robert Legault (also known as readwrite) was found dead in his apartment of a heart attack. People (including his sister in Seattle) got worried when he didn't get back to them, and filed a missing persons report. A cop broke into his apartment and found him.

It was really weird how I met Robert. We met at a party at a science fiction convention, and at the time had NO idea we were related. The one day my mother, doing genealogy research, was talking to his mother and she mentioned how her son was really into science fiction, and my mother told her about me. When she contacted him he told her yes, we did know each other, and even though I was lousy at remembering the names of people I had just recently met, somehow I knew it was him. I'm still not sure why.

We actually became pretty good friends. I remember staying at his apartment a couple of times when I was going to concerts in Manhattan. But in recent years, since I moved to L.A., I haven't been able to contact him often, and every time I was in NY one or the other of us was busy and we weren't able to meet up. I feel pretty lousy that watching his LiveJournal was probably the only contact we'd had in about 2 years, and I hadn't seen him in longer than that. I was hoping to see him at Lunacon next week (since that's during Spring Break), and it sounds like he was planning on going.

I guess it's a good thing I put off my Lunacon planning so long since I canceled those plans and came out to NY this weekend instead for the memorial service earlier today. The service was really nice. The place was full to overflowing, and a lot of people, including some very old friends of his, told some great stories of his life. There was a lot of laughter and fond remembrance of him. I was debating talking but decided other people had a lot more and better stories about him. All the stories there and on the Making Light page about what happened, made me realize how much we had in common and makes me wish I'd gotten to know him better than I did. I probably would have wound up in editing just like him if I hadn't gotten burned out by a few bad, boring, and mundane editing jobs. I've always been very good at catching every little error in everything, and it sounds like he was the same way. And we also shared a love of music.

I got to see some people today, including his sister Jeanne and a couple of people from here, which was nice, but I wish the circumstances had been better. Ellen Datlow posted some nice thoughts about the memorial service with a link to photos from the event.

Well, I suppose I should at least try to get some sleep now. I also need to post about the Game Developer's Conference (which I had just returned from when I heard the news about Robert.) That will be a much more cheerful post.

Oh, and since my mother wasn't home when Jeanne called, I heard the news about Robert on a science fiction mailing list before I heard it from my family, which was weird.