Passing of a community member

I received abrupt, sad family news yesterday from my dad: my aunt (my dad's brother's wife) was killed on Thursday in a traffic accident. She was 61.

I'm posting about it here, in particular, because she was fannish: back in the Livejournal heyday, she blogged there as suchthefangirl.

She and my uncle got married when I was 9 years old. They lived on the west coast of the United States, and I lived on the east coast of Canada, so I didn't get to know her very well when I was a kid. But then when I was in my mid twenties I decided to fly out and visit them for a week. When I arrived at their apartment, my aunt was watching an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer with her two daughters, my cousins (who were 8 and 10 at the time). "Hi! We'll greet you properly at the end of the episode!" my aunt said, and I knew instantly that she was my kind of people. :D

Later that day, my aunt and I got talking first about Buffy, and then about fanfic, and we discovered that we had a mutual love of fanfic in general and slash in particular. After that, for the rest of the visit, whenever we had a spare moment, she showed me episodes of her beloved show Sports Night, which she loved for the slashiness. We had wonderful discussions about Buffy, about Due South, about Battlestar Galactica. (Including some lively debates about the new vs the old; I'd come in via the new show and was in love with Starbuck; she'd never warmed up to the new Starbuck because she was in love with the old Starbuck/Apollo as a m/m slash pairing.)

She was the first of my relatives of my dad's generation who I really connected to as a friend. I can't believe she's gone.