Legacy Matters

Cathy Seipp, R.I.P.

Cathy Seipp, a non-smoker, a complete original with an unorthodox sensibility and take on the world,  died yesterday after a five year battle with lung cancer, at the age of 49.

As a blogger,  she would have been delighted that she was number 1at Technorati  in the list of top searches.  The sendoff she's received from bloggers is quite extraordinary with hundreds writing posts.

Susan Estrich remembers her special friend in a lovely column and quotes what Cathy herself wrote about lung cancer.

Amy Alkon, the Advice Goddess, a close friend who was with Cathy at the end, writes how Cathy's kindness and generosity and enormous capacity for friendship through the years was returned by a great outpouring by all her friends, part of team Cathy, who made sure she was never alone, that there was plenty of food and always company for her chemo sessions. 

Kathryn Jean Lopez calls her Fearlessly Independent.  As editor of the National Review, she put together a symposium of friends and fans for a fond farewell.  Some selections:

Charlotte Hays: "lovely in person and wicked in print."
Mickey Kaus: "I liked her for another reason: She was so grouchy! She just wouldn’t take any s**t at all."
Mark Steyn "loved the great brio of her writing...she also communicated a great joy and relish in writing, and you’d be surprised how few writers do that. I also liked the way you never quite knew where the next paragraph would lead."

John O'Sullivan calls her An Unorthodox Talent
If Raymond Chandler had been reincarnated in 1990s L.A. as a girl with a can-do attitude, the result would have been someone like Cathy Seipp

Rob Long, a longtime friend, writes that last Friday at the hospital, he watched Cathy

Cathy methodically rip out the ads from Vogue and Vanity Fair. “I’m not going to be lugging these huge things around,” she said. “Seriously. They make these magazines so heavy. Life is too short.”

Too short doesn’t begin to describe it. I go to her website. I look at her picture. I hit refresh.

These things take a while, I’m told, to sink in.

Cathy, a single mom, devoted to her 17-year-old daughter Maia, was able to see her off to college, and living an independent life.  Maia, by all accounts, a precociously mature girl who takes after her mother, must be tremendously heartened by the river of tributes to Cathy, even buoyed by the outpouring of affection and love.

Still, sorrow will mark her in the months and years to come.  It was Oscar Wilde of all people who wrote, "Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground,"

On that holy ground, she will learn what Cormac McCarthy wrote
The closest bonds we will ever know are the bonds of grief. The deepest community is one of sorrow.

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