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.

For some reason, when I read As Nature Made Him a few months ago, I didn’t look up David Reimer on Wikipedia or anywhere else. If I had, I would have found out that he committed suicide in 2004. I got the news from an anti-circumcision website, where he was reported as a “long-delayed death due to circumcision.”

For those of you who aren’t familiar with David Reimer’s story, he was born as Bruce, an identical twin boy. His circumcision was botched and his penis was accidentally removed. This was in the mid-1960s in Winnipeg, and his parents didn’t know what to do - their doctors recommended putting him in a dress and raising him as a girl. Because the babies were twins, Brian and “Brenda” became famous as an example of how gender roles were learned rather than present from birth; psychologist John Money viewed “Brenda” as his greatest achievement. But as we all would find very obvious now, putting a boy in a dress does not make him a girl. After an emotionally troubled childhood, “Brenda” shed her female role at age 15 and became David Reimer.

After years of hiding the truth, he went public, appearing on Oprah and working with John Colapinto on a 1997 Rolling Stone article that became the book As Nature Made Him: The Boy who was Raised a Girl. He was motivated by sexologist Milton Diamond to speak out to prevent babies from suffering the same fate he had. But unfortunately, too many things were going wrong in David’s life. Despite the anti-circumcision website’s assertion that he died as a result of his circumcision (presumably due to the trauma it caused him throughout his life), he was also suffering the effects of a divorce, a bad relationship with his parents, and the overdose death of his brother Brian in 2002. Colapinto, who knew David well, wrote about the real reasons for his suicide. It was a tragic end to an ultimately unsatisfying life, but hopefully lessons learned from David Reimer’s experience will keep this kind of treatment from happening again.

I was so sorry to learn via Ridor that Gil Eastman has died. For those of you not familiar with him, Gil was an amazing voice in the Deaf community. Watching him sign was like listening to James Earl Jones speak…rich, powerful, and intense. He contributed so much to the Deaf arts community and the community at large. With Mary Lou Novitsky, he co-hosted “Deaf Mosaic” for 10 years, a fantastic newsmagazine produced at Gallaudet University that I watched every Sunday when I was a kid; he won an Emmy for his involvement in the show. He was also known for stirring performances of ASL literature, including a great version of the U.S. national anthem (Star-Spangled Banner). He contributed to a production of ASL poetry on videotape, he wrote plays about Deaf people and Deaf culture, and he was a professional storyteller.

I am greatly saddened by Gil Eastman’s death, I had always hoped to see him speak in person. I will have to resign myself to watching as many old tapes as I can, so I can see those beautiful signs over and over.

For some reason - well, because of a discussion in dcwmata - I have gotten interested in deaths on the DC Metro. I did some research, and of course the computer crashed before I saved it. So I reconstructed it, and I’ve listed some deaths here; currently they’re chronologically sorted. I’m curious about how many of them are suicides, how frequently they occur, and whether my perception that the Red Line is the most dangerous line has any basis in reality. (This will be somewhat difficult to determine, because the Red Line is also the oldest line, so of course it will have more deaths going back further than other lines.) All links are to abstracts, and items without links are from the “Historical Washington Post” archives, which are part of the subscription-only ProQuest database. (Many libraries offer this database; you can access it from your library’s website and then you simply input your library card number.) There are two deaths listed as January 1st with “n/a” for much of the information - those deaths were mentioned in one of the other articles, but I didn’t find direct references myself. At least not yet…I will probably keep this research going until I get bored. If I don’t, I might expand to other cities.

Prologue: It is difficult to write about the death penalty without taking a side, but I am going to attempt to remain neutral. Additionally, this topic may make some readers uncomfortable.

A debate currently taking place in California questions whether lethal injection is a cruel and unusual form of execution. Out of all methods of execution currently practiced in the United States, lethal injection is the most common; if the California case determines that it is cruel and unusual, significant changes may be coming for how America executes its prisoners.
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Prologue: I have been meaning to write this piece for at least a year and a half. Thanks are owed to NonFicWriMo for finally spurring me to write it.

May 10, 1996 was the deadliest day ever on Mount Everest. Deaths are not uncommon in mountaineering, and Everest has claimed many lives in its history, including some of the strongest in the climbing community. But never before had eight people died in a single day: the greatest tragedy on Mount Everest. Even after the climbing season was over, debate raged on about what had happened on that day.
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It’s been two weeks since my kitty girl had to leave us. I am doing much better but looking at this Catster thread still brings tears to my eyes. Recently we were driving on Route 29 near Fairfax Circle, near some condos or townhouses (something residential), and we saw several cars pulled over to the side of the road and a group of people standing in a circle around something in the middle of the road. As we drove by we saw it was someone’s golden retriever (or another large dog) who had been struck. That really wrenched my heart. I’m so glad we got to be with her, that we got to say goodbye, that she died peacefully. My torn heart just went out to the owners of that poor dog.

Wu is still in her little white box, and her picture is propped up in front of it right next to the TV in our bedroom so we see her all the time. (We had kept her in her favorite basket, but Toadstool only let us do that for a couple of days before reclaiming it.) Her urn is on top of the TV, and two of her favorite toys - the ring from around a milk jug and a thick little piece of black cord - are on top of her box. I don’t know when we’re going to put her in her last home. I can still see her in front of me on the table, see her fall as the drug went into her veins. Sigh…it seems I have mostly pushed the grief aside in favor of things like birthdays and legal drama, but when I think about her it just keeps hurting me. So I’m crying at the moment. I haven’t been able to look at her final picture lately, but this one is on my laptop’s wallpaper and this one is on A’s laptop wallpaper.

Oh, I miss my kitty girl.

Hi everybody. I’m hanging in there okay. I was very sad at home this morning, and when I got to work I was looking at cremation jewelry so I was still kind of mopey, but I’ve been goofing off for a while so I’m doing okay now. Wu is always somewhere in my thoughts, but I find that I am able to relax at least and not get stressed out. We received the UPS tracking number for the urn this morning, and A brought her to the crematory. They were done with her by a little after 12:30 so A will bring her home tonight. I assume they give us a little box temporarily. I want to keep her up in the bedroom with us for now because that’s where she spent most of her time. I couldn’t do it last night because there was still a cat in the box, but I want her close. I’m so glad I made this decision, I’m glad we’re keeping her in our home. Part of the reason is that she was never allowed outside (she was already declawed in front when we got her) so it would have been weird to put her out there, and eventually she would have been gone. We have buried a couple of chinchillas and a hamster out in the yard, but that spot has been grown over now, and that was several years ago so I doubt there’s even anything left. I don’t want that to happen to my Wubie.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned yet what the hardest part was. When I brought her to the vet Wednesday night, she looked very ill. But they had her in an oxygen cage, so she was breathing much better. When we went to visit with her before they did it, she looked fine. She was alert, she recognized us, she gave me that wonderful picture. Even when they brought her out of the cage and put her on the table, she wanted to jump down from there. It was unbelievably painful to put her to sleep because she looked healthy. If she had been droopy and sick, it might have been a little easier, but she looked like she was ready to come home with us. It just about broke my heart, and I’m going to stop this paragraph before I cry.

I’ve had a stomachache for most of the day and I’m not sure why. It’s not quite nausea, just discomfort. I have been playing online pretty much the whole day. I do have to stay until the end of the day, though, because I can’t pick up my food until 5:00. I used to leave a little early on Fridays but I can’t do that anymore because of the food. By the way, I’m proud of myself for sticking to my diet yesterday - I really wanted to eat crap just for something to do, but I didn’t do it. Also, I lost four pounds last week, but so far this week I’ve only lost half of one. Quicklinks will probably return tomorrow; they auto-posted yesterday but I took them down because it didn’t feel right. Obviously nothing new was added yesterday, so I’ll put the ones that posted yesterday into the auto-post for tomorrow.

We are not leaving for New Jersey tonight after all; there are a few reasons for this but the main one is Veterans Day. Government offices will all be closed, so we would have only tomorrow to get things done. Instead we plan to go up next week. A and I each get three days of bereavement leave from work, so I am thinking we will go up next Tuesday night and stay through Saturday morning (leaving earlier if we’re done earlier).

My father’s brother says the estate is worth $100,000 but I’m thinking it will be less than that. My father had $11,000 in a bank account, a heavily-modified (to hold ham equipment) Ford Escort that’s five or six years old, and his trailer. I did a little poking around and it seems trailers sell for between $8,000 and $30,000 - this one is apparently in bad condition so it will probably be at the lower end of that range. There is a bunch of electronics and ham equipment in the trailer too; no idea how much that’s all going to turn out to be worth. We don’t know who is the beneficiary on the life insurance, and we don’t know if my father had a safe deposit box, so I am thinking all of this will come to about $50,000 at most. (These numbers absolutely stupefy me, I’ve never had that much money.) $5,000 of that will be going to reimburse my father’s brother for the funeral (I’m still disappointed that I wasn’t found in time for that, and I think the delay might have been semi-intentional), and I also plan to give him a portion to thank him for doing the right thing and contacting me. The rest is going to be college money - I never finished, and I’m hoping there will be enough for me to cut work back to part-time and get a degree.