Legacy Matters

The Blogosphere's Irish Wake for Cathy Siepp

As of 7:45am this morning she is still breathing and pulsing but is passing peacefully.”
— Maia Lazar, her daughter on Cathy's blog.

Almost 600 comments and counting.  If you read her and loved her writing as I did, please add your own

Sissy calls it a Blogospheric Irish Wake for a beloved free spirit and, stopped short by the news of Cathy's impending death, spent the day reading tributes "which were like a river at flood tide".

I wrote about her in The Upside of Cancer in 2005.  The upside?

One is that you can put the fear of God into people with hardly any effort at all,
and The other advantage is people reveal themselves to you as they really are – it’s almost like a solution for invisible ink.

I met her only once at the Pajamas Media inaugural in NYC.  She was small, thin, blond, with a glass of wine,  greeting one blogger journalist after another with warm smiles and big hugs and still kind and welcoming to me, who didn't make the first cut, but was just another groovy blogger

Mary Madigan quotes from her Normblog profile

Norm: What would you call your autobiography?
Cathy: For many years as a journalist who spent a lot of time interviewing people, I imagined writing a book or column called What About ME and MY Feelings?!?. But now that I have a blog, that's handled.

Norm: What would be your most important piece of advice about life?

Cathy: I've always been a big believer in the importance of kicking your own ass. That is, forcing yourself to do what you don't necessarily feel like doing at the time.

She wore discount and offended fashion editors in the "bitch pits" on both coasts, called a young women a  "girl" thereby shocking the panelists and audience at a Times Book Festival, thought that health insurance should be unbundled from employment so people could take responsibility for themselves as she herself did with the government providing only a safety net, pointed out that Mean Old Republicans Care, skewered the media for its self-important pompous moments, wondered why in California child molesters and sex offenders were a protected class ,  pricked the Hip Hypocrites who claim to support free speech unless they disagree with it, defended C.S. Lewis against those who called Narnia, sexist, racist and intolerant,  all while battling lung cancer and she never smoked!

Life's not fair and she will be missed.  The only comfort is the imminence of her arrival at the pearly gates will be heralded  by the ululation by all the bloggers acutely conscious of her last moments on this side, her transitus, her passing over.

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