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daemonlunaWhat do you say after losing a friend whose life's orbit has been entwined with yours for more than twenty years? To say zulu was smart, and funny, and down to earth and kind is a vast understatement. She was a writer and a storyteller with a huge love and talent for the written word (so much she got a PhD in creative writing). She had the best, dorkiest sense of humour, and a wicked sense of comedic and dramatic timing. She loved her wife and son, her whole family, and the outdoors immensely.
We met because Barb joined the speculative fiction writing group that Zulu and her mom both belonged to, and crossed into each others' lives at just the right time. She threw a coming-out party within the first six months we knew each other. "Guys," she said, "this isn't just a regular party, I invited you all over to tell you... I'm gay." "Yes," we said. "We know, and this is why we got you this card, and we all signed it." (Except for one friend, our token straight guy, who said helplessly, "I didn't know!") Zulu was not subtle. She gave a sex ed crash course to everyone at the back of the bus on a band trip in junior high by doing a dramatic reading from the Clan of the Cave Bear books, or so we were told. I have no trouble believing it. She had a shy streak too though. We went to Pride together, stood in the pouring rain to watch the parade, and the first year when Barb said, "Hey, that girl's checking you out!" Zulu immediately decided that the sidewalk was the most interesting thing she'd seen all day. She tagged her introspective Livejournal feelings posts "blueberry pie filling" for the soft gooey bits underneath.
We went to multiple cons together in our twenties, and Zulu could meander through a room party and emerge with enough snacks stashed about her person for breakfast AND lunch the next day. I wish I had recordings of her singing our friend's filk, especially "I'm Sorry, Larry Niven," inspired by the time she announced in the con suite, "And then, naked swimming!" not knowing that the Guest of Honour, venerable SF author Larry Niven, was RIGHT behind her. She once camped out in our living room for almost a week in an extended two-degree-of-SGA-actor-separation movie marathon and her mom called us to see if we'd heard from her lately, an hour after we finally dropped her off at home. ("I told her to email me if I wasn't answering the phone!" Zulu said aggrievedly.) She concoted elaborate dramas when we cooked together. At a dumpling making party, she started out depicting the woes of a poor, beleagured dumpling-making servant girl. By the time we finished folding the bowl of chopped shrimp into the wrappers, she'd overthrown the government and was controlling a whole nation.
We helped each other move. She was responsible for petting our small but vocal cat Minnow in her carrier the whole way from OldCity to NewCity, since every time she stopped, Minnow got louder and louder. She invented a whole series of sound effects for Betrayal at House on the Hill, a favourite board game, and I don't know how we can play it without her. (The event cards make the X-Files theme, the item cards make an eerie whistling sound, and the omen cards make a dramatic duuuh-duh-DUH! and I wish I could remember how the Star Trek fight music factored into things.) She drank from straws always out of the side of her mouth. She loved mango and shrimp and guacamole, and once called us to say "So, I'm having supper with my parents, and said no, I want my steak the way Barb cooks it, so my mom said I should cook it myself... how DO you cook it?" (The answer was, rare. Three and a half minutes per side, flip it twice per side.)
She decided to do a Master's in science fiction, went to the UK for a year, and met a girl. An online friend, not from the UK, who came to visit her. That wasbell . Their wedding was less than fifteen people, their cake has emojis made with Skittles on it, and Barb and I were so happy to be with them, and share their joy. They got married in the wedding commissioner's living room, and then we all went out for Thai food, and it was beautiful. By which I also mean I have photos of the two of them wearing tiaras flipped down like Geordi's visor on ST:TNG, and of Zulu fake-restraining Bell as she stabbed the wedding cake with the cake knife.
Zulu always wanted to be a parent. When she and Bell told us they were planning to have a baby, I made an out of character high-pitched squeaking noise that risked alarming the cats. I knit them two mama bear and one baby bear hats for Christmas. A sleep-deprived new parent Zulu did say, "Guys... I realize that when I said I wanted a baby, I was actually picturing a preschooler I could take to the park and zoo. But he'll grow into it." Obviously, L did. They discovered at the height of the COVID shut downs (including the libraries) that he was ready for reading chapter books, and I was able to surprise them with some books because one of the local book stores was doing door-to-door deliveries.
She wrote prolifically and beautifully. (She wrote so much fanfic on our living room couch over the years. So much smut. Occasionally went into a research deep dive. Fandom means having your friend looking up sex toys for escalating purposes from your couch is a normal platonic situation.) She went through a phase early in her original fiction where she just wasn't sure how to end things, and Barb teased her that every story finished with the protagonist going insane, dying, or both. (She got over it.) Her PhD thesis was a multi-path branching novel using the text-based game software Twine about a poly society where children were genderless, and you picked your gender based on familial ties and obligations when you came of age. And then she pared it down to one story line, and got it published as a novel.
She wrote fanfic, so much fanfic. She modded the House big bang, and set out to comment on every story submitted to challenges, and embraced writing tiny crossovers, and drabbles and prompts and novel-length series. She let me throw prompts for obscure Canadian TV at her for about two years, and half of the fanfic for This is Wonderland exists because of things she wrote for me. I wish I could find the vid she made me, and I got a crossover fic from her for Christmas that year. She fell back into fandom hard with A League of Their Own, we marathoned the whole series with her one weekend when she and Bell came to visit (to be clear, I think this was her fourth viewing at least at that point?) I'm so glad she had a fandom community again. I felt it in my heart when she said this summer that one of her goals was to finish all her WIPS. She started a new social media AU (dammit Zulu, how do I typeset this?) posting from her hospice bed, writing up until a week before she died.
When I started fanbinding, I made her a pamphlet of her crackfic for Christmas. It was right around the time we found out she first had cancer. Surgery, chemo, and then we had another two years with her. I made her an anthology of her ALOTO fic--all that she'd written at the time, at least. ("Would... you make a book of my fic?" she said when she saw my first casebound books. I never want to forget the way she said my name when she was asking me for something that was a foregone conclusion. "That was already the plan for Christmas," I told her.) I bound her rarepair House mpreg crackfic this past year. I didn't finish it until the spring--and then we found out the cancer was back. She asked me for a favour over the summer. Anything, I said. She wanted a pamphlet of one of her ALOTO fic. I did three fic, and put them into her hands with her belated Christmas present. I wanted to do more, but was feeling overwhelmed and didn't know where to start. I wanted to bind more of her fic than I could possibly accomplish, and that if I tried to make this the only project I had, I would probably collapse under my own sadness. (I don't know if you all know this... but she has 350+ fic on AO3.) So I asked for help, and the Renegade fanbinding community responded in a way I should have expected--with immense enthusiasm and zero restraint. I've got some plans around sharing the results collectively at some point. Timelines got bumped up by a month. There was a rush for mailing. Sadly, only some of the books made it to her before her death. The group shipment box in particular showed up too late on the day that she died. Bell took it with her to supper with friends and family to open as a special treat. I think there will be thirty-some books of all sizes all told, and I have about four more in progress, though I'll never get to put them in her hands and see her grin and say "Aww, you GUYS..."
She was so clever, so curious about the world, and so damn funny. Being around her felt like family in the best, uncomplicated way. Small things that stick--the last time she and Bell came to visit this past winter, as they unloaded things from the car, she announced, "If by 'did I bring the snacks,' you mean, 'did I empty the snack shelf of all the partially-eaten bags of all the flavours of potato chips, put them in a box, and bring them here, then the answer is yes, yes I did." We watched Jupiter Ascending, hung out, and went out for ice cream in January. Two weeks later, we got the news that she needed to start chemo again. (Zulu, relaying this incident after the fact: "So, L really wanted me to go to a parent event at school, so I dragged myself out in a baseball cap and sweats, with my pump. The other moms were like... (fake polite pained smiles) 'and how are... you?' and I was like 'Baaaad. I am not good, and you should feel bad for me.'") Then in Jun, news that it hadn't worked. We thought we'd have a year if we were lucky. We saw her in August, a month before she died. They'd just adjusted her pain meds, she was having a good day, and was up and about, and there was a group hug when we left. She went downhill fast, and we did a short video chat the night before she moved into hospice three weeks later. We were supposed to go visit her this weekend, and instead we'll be going to a celebration of her life.
I was at work when I got the news from Bell, and grateful to the universe that it came in a quiet moment early on a busy day. When I got home at lunch, Barb pointed at the front door where I was standing, dissolved into tears, and said, "I can't stop thinking about how many times we hugged her hello and goodbye RIGHT THERE." She gave such good hugs. I can't think of anyone else I know whose reaction to their imminent death would essentially be "well, I had a good run!"
In a move that will surprise no-one who knew her, she wrote her own obituary. In the email about Zulu's death, and how to support the family, Bell goes on to say "Do not send us flowers. If you send me flowers, my cats will eat and convert them into barf. Please do not give me cat barf! I already have enough! :D" and followed that up with two charities to donate to instead (a local organization supporting trans folks, and an indigenous-led water protection organization). Trans rights! Water rights! But no cat barf.
And what else is there to say? Zulu, I love you and I miss you. That's all.
zulu was smart, and funny, and down to earth and kind is a vast understatement. She was a writer and a storyteller with a huge love and talent for the written word (so much she got a PhD in creative writing). She had the best, dorkiest sense of humour, and a wicked sense of comedic and dramatic timing. She loved her wife and son, her whole family, and the outdoors immensely.We met because Barb joined the speculative fiction writing group that Zulu and her mom both belonged to, and crossed into each others' lives at just the right time. She threw a coming-out party within the first six months we knew each other. "Guys," she said, "this isn't just a regular party, I invited you all over to tell you... I'm gay." "Yes," we said. "We know, and this is why we got you this card, and we all signed it." (Except for one friend, our token straight guy, who said helplessly, "I didn't know!") Zulu was not subtle. She gave a sex ed crash course to everyone at the back of the bus on a band trip in junior high by doing a dramatic reading from the Clan of the Cave Bear books, or so we were told. I have no trouble believing it. She had a shy streak too though. We went to Pride together, stood in the pouring rain to watch the parade, and the first year when Barb said, "Hey, that girl's checking you out!" Zulu immediately decided that the sidewalk was the most interesting thing she'd seen all day. She tagged her introspective Livejournal feelings posts "blueberry pie filling" for the soft gooey bits underneath.
We went to multiple cons together in our twenties, and Zulu could meander through a room party and emerge with enough snacks stashed about her person for breakfast AND lunch the next day. I wish I had recordings of her singing our friend's filk, especially "I'm Sorry, Larry Niven," inspired by the time she announced in the con suite, "And then, naked swimming!" not knowing that the Guest of Honour, venerable SF author Larry Niven, was RIGHT behind her. She once camped out in our living room for almost a week in an extended two-degree-of-SGA-actor-separation movie marathon and her mom called us to see if we'd heard from her lately, an hour after we finally dropped her off at home. ("I told her to email me if I wasn't answering the phone!" Zulu said aggrievedly.) She concoted elaborate dramas when we cooked together. At a dumpling making party, she started out depicting the woes of a poor, beleagured dumpling-making servant girl. By the time we finished folding the bowl of chopped shrimp into the wrappers, she'd overthrown the government and was controlling a whole nation.
We helped each other move. She was responsible for petting our small but vocal cat Minnow in her carrier the whole way from OldCity to NewCity, since every time she stopped, Minnow got louder and louder. She invented a whole series of sound effects for Betrayal at House on the Hill, a favourite board game, and I don't know how we can play it without her. (The event cards make the X-Files theme, the item cards make an eerie whistling sound, and the omen cards make a dramatic duuuh-duh-DUH! and I wish I could remember how the Star Trek fight music factored into things.) She drank from straws always out of the side of her mouth. She loved mango and shrimp and guacamole, and once called us to say "So, I'm having supper with my parents, and said no, I want my steak the way Barb cooks it, so my mom said I should cook it myself... how DO you cook it?" (The answer was, rare. Three and a half minutes per side, flip it twice per side.)
She decided to do a Master's in science fiction, went to the UK for a year, and met a girl. An online friend, not from the UK, who came to visit her. That was
bell . Their wedding was less than fifteen people, their cake has emojis made with Skittles on it, and Barb and I were so happy to be with them, and share their joy. They got married in the wedding commissioner's living room, and then we all went out for Thai food, and it was beautiful. By which I also mean I have photos of the two of them wearing tiaras flipped down like Geordi's visor on ST:TNG, and of Zulu fake-restraining Bell as she stabbed the wedding cake with the cake knife. Zulu always wanted to be a parent. When she and Bell told us they were planning to have a baby, I made an out of character high-pitched squeaking noise that risked alarming the cats. I knit them two mama bear and one baby bear hats for Christmas. A sleep-deprived new parent Zulu did say, "Guys... I realize that when I said I wanted a baby, I was actually picturing a preschooler I could take to the park and zoo. But he'll grow into it." Obviously, L did. They discovered at the height of the COVID shut downs (including the libraries) that he was ready for reading chapter books, and I was able to surprise them with some books because one of the local book stores was doing door-to-door deliveries.
She wrote prolifically and beautifully. (She wrote so much fanfic on our living room couch over the years. So much smut. Occasionally went into a research deep dive. Fandom means having your friend looking up sex toys for escalating purposes from your couch is a normal platonic situation.) She went through a phase early in her original fiction where she just wasn't sure how to end things, and Barb teased her that every story finished with the protagonist going insane, dying, or both. (She got over it.) Her PhD thesis was a multi-path branching novel using the text-based game software Twine about a poly society where children were genderless, and you picked your gender based on familial ties and obligations when you came of age. And then she pared it down to one story line, and got it published as a novel.
She wrote fanfic, so much fanfic. She modded the House big bang, and set out to comment on every story submitted to challenges, and embraced writing tiny crossovers, and drabbles and prompts and novel-length series. She let me throw prompts for obscure Canadian TV at her for about two years, and half of the fanfic for This is Wonderland exists because of things she wrote for me. I wish I could find the vid she made me, and I got a crossover fic from her for Christmas that year. She fell back into fandom hard with A League of Their Own, we marathoned the whole series with her one weekend when she and Bell came to visit (to be clear, I think this was her fourth viewing at least at that point?) I'm so glad she had a fandom community again. I felt it in my heart when she said this summer that one of her goals was to finish all her WIPS. She started a new social media AU (dammit Zulu, how do I typeset this?) posting from her hospice bed, writing up until a week before she died.
When I started fanbinding, I made her a pamphlet of her crackfic for Christmas. It was right around the time we found out she first had cancer. Surgery, chemo, and then we had another two years with her. I made her an anthology of her ALOTO fic--all that she'd written at the time, at least. ("Would... you make a book of my fic?" she said when she saw my first casebound books. I never want to forget the way she said my name when she was asking me for something that was a foregone conclusion. "That was already the plan for Christmas," I told her.) I bound her rarepair House mpreg crackfic this past year. I didn't finish it until the spring--and then we found out the cancer was back. She asked me for a favour over the summer. Anything, I said. She wanted a pamphlet of one of her ALOTO fic. I did three fic, and put them into her hands with her belated Christmas present. I wanted to do more, but was feeling overwhelmed and didn't know where to start. I wanted to bind more of her fic than I could possibly accomplish, and that if I tried to make this the only project I had, I would probably collapse under my own sadness. (I don't know if you all know this... but she has 350+ fic on AO3.) So I asked for help, and the Renegade fanbinding community responded in a way I should have expected--with immense enthusiasm and zero restraint. I've got some plans around sharing the results collectively at some point. Timelines got bumped up by a month. There was a rush for mailing. Sadly, only some of the books made it to her before her death. The group shipment box in particular showed up too late on the day that she died. Bell took it with her to supper with friends and family to open as a special treat. I think there will be thirty-some books of all sizes all told, and I have about four more in progress, though I'll never get to put them in her hands and see her grin and say "Aww, you GUYS..."
She was so clever, so curious about the world, and so damn funny. Being around her felt like family in the best, uncomplicated way. Small things that stick--the last time she and Bell came to visit this past winter, as they unloaded things from the car, she announced, "If by 'did I bring the snacks,' you mean, 'did I empty the snack shelf of all the partially-eaten bags of all the flavours of potato chips, put them in a box, and bring them here, then the answer is yes, yes I did." We watched Jupiter Ascending, hung out, and went out for ice cream in January. Two weeks later, we got the news that she needed to start chemo again. (Zulu, relaying this incident after the fact: "So, L really wanted me to go to a parent event at school, so I dragged myself out in a baseball cap and sweats, with my pump. The other moms were like... (fake polite pained smiles) 'and how are... you?' and I was like 'Baaaad. I am not good, and you should feel bad for me.'") Then in Jun, news that it hadn't worked. We thought we'd have a year if we were lucky. We saw her in August, a month before she died. They'd just adjusted her pain meds, she was having a good day, and was up and about, and there was a group hug when we left. She went downhill fast, and we did a short video chat the night before she moved into hospice three weeks later. We were supposed to go visit her this weekend, and instead we'll be going to a celebration of her life.
I was at work when I got the news from Bell, and grateful to the universe that it came in a quiet moment early on a busy day. When I got home at lunch, Barb pointed at the front door where I was standing, dissolved into tears, and said, "I can't stop thinking about how many times we hugged her hello and goodbye RIGHT THERE." She gave such good hugs. I can't think of anyone else I know whose reaction to their imminent death would essentially be "well, I had a good run!"
In a move that will surprise no-one who knew her, she wrote her own obituary. In the email about Zulu's death, and how to support the family, Bell goes on to say "Do not send us flowers. If you send me flowers, my cats will eat and convert them into barf. Please do not give me cat barf! I already have enough! :D" and followed that up with two charities to donate to instead (a local organization supporting trans folks, and an indigenous-led water protection organization). Trans rights! Water rights! But no cat barf.
And what else is there to say? Zulu, I love you and I miss you. That's all.
