There are a ton of songs about Julia, but the one sticking in my head right now is John Lennon’s elegy to his mom. I can’t get it out of my head. It’s so haunting, so evocative of how I feel right now.

My friend Julia Case died last week. Some of you may have known her as mornhyland. She had a lot of diverse experiences in her life, a lot of wonderful things but also a lot of sorrow. She was deaf-blind, and suffered from bipolar disorder, PTSD, DID, and possibly other mental illnesses. She was in and out of mental hospitals pretty regularly, but underneath all that she was a brilliant mathematician who loved technology, and that’s what we frequently talked about. Every time I mused about wanting a new cell phone, she’d give me the lowdown because she knew all about those things. We talked about programming and other geek toys. She had an answer for techie questions I never thought anybody would know, and she had that answer ready within minutes of me posting to Twitter or LiveJournal.

Julia had been going through some hard times recently. She moved from Massachusetts to Oregon, and she broke up with her wife, to whom she was legally married (in Massachusetts anyway). She sent me a message on Twitter not long ago, so distraught over her breakup that she asked if she would make it through. I told her yes she would, because she was one of the strongest people I know. She had survived SO much. And really, things were starting to look up. She had interpreters in her college classes, she had just gotten a dog named Chance from Project Pooch, and I believe she was intending to train him as a service dog - guide or therapy, I’m not sure which. She had just gotten hearing aids (one day after I got mine) and was having a hard time adjusting to all the new sounds. She was also taking mobility training, learning how to guide herself with a white cane and so forth. She talked about wanting to learn Braille. I honestly thought things were looking up, but something was obviously wrong.

Julia took her own life on Wednesday, April 23, 2008. She was 39 years old. I will miss her very much.