I wrote the letter that I talked about so long ago. It's almost a thousand words, and I don't know if it will fit in one post, but here it is. I haven't even reread it yet -- I just saved the file and copied the text. I'm going to go sit and cry some now, probably.

To the cast and crew of Supernatural, especially Jensen Ackles, Jared Padalecki, and Misha Collins: It’s taken me a year to write this letter. I’m not sure I’m ready to write it even now, but as weird as it sounds, I feel like you should know that a member of the SPN Family is gone. Today’s her birthday, and to honor I decided to marathon Season 1 (This although all either of us ever needed to inspire a marathon rewatch was a day with a Y in it.) while working on this letter. ita (always lowercase, always) was a Supernatural fan from the beginning. She was a Fan from way back, though—Buffy, Angel, Lord of the Rings, Firefly, Batman, and many, many more. When I wandered into the online community she had built from the ground up, I was in awe of her. She was smart, gorgeous, fierce, loyal, surprisingly tender, and above all passionately articulate about anything she loved (or really, really didn’t love). We had almost nothing in common, until the Winchesters.

Even then, it took a little while. We knew each other from the community where we both participated, but we didn’t really Know Each Other. Debating about Sam, Dean, John, Bobby, Ellen, Jo, and all the others in the beginning was one of the ways we connected, but I think it was when she drew a picture to accompany one of the first SPN fanfics I had written that we really clicked. For years after that, she drew from prompts I gave her, and I wrote based on pictures she drew.

That wasn’t all, though. We had a dedicated thread in our online community just for Supernatural discussion, where we watch-and-posted new episodes and debated every Winchester issue there was. With her spurring us on, we made lists of favorite quotes. We made lists of favorite episodes, season by season. Sometimes we made lists of favorite emotional episodes, or funny ones. We dissected problematic episodes and beloved ones. We made playlists of Winchester-inspired music, and endlessly imagined Sam and Dean’s childhood. ita in particular defended John there and in other spaces online, where she eventually kickstarted other communities, and more discussion from new voices. She drew fanart almost daily, sometimes giving herself challenges to try a particular style or concentrate on a specific subject (Hi, Castiel’s wings). We were, I think, sometimes obnoxious in our diehard fannishness, the people at the game who show up not only in team jerseys but with face paint, pennants, foam fingers, and the loudest cheers.

Through it all, of course, ita had a job and an apartment and laundry and groceries and family, just like everyone else. Unlike the rest of us, though, ita also had pain. She lived with migraines so severe and unrelenting that at one point she was scheduled for ER treatments of dilaudid weekly, and later had a home nurse who administered the medication. She tried everything possible to fight the pain—Botox, massage, experimental medication—but nothing ever worked well or for very long.

For those of us who had known her for a long time, it was jarring—the ita we knew, the ita who had built the board where we posted and once served as security at a fandom convention, who had lived in Jamaica and England and Canada before settling in LA and had traveled the world, was, we all liked to say, someone who could kill you with her pinkie (if not her words). She practiced krav maga, and loved it fiercely—her rants on Sarah Michelle Gellar’s fighting form on Buffy were epic. (She wasn’t wildly impressed with Scarlet Johansen as Black Widow, either.) But as the migraines took hold, that kind of practice wasn’t possible anymore. I think Supernatural was a saving grace, something for her to love just as intensely as she had martial arts when her body had forced her into limited physical activity.

There’s (continued...)

( continues...) so much more about her to tell—her love of pink gingham and combat boots, often worn together; her fascination with scars and the stories they represent; her wonderfully complicated accent, a mixture of Jamaican, British, and thoroughly American, with some Canadian sounds thrown in; her fervent love of her sister, and her parents; her baking experiments and her favorite foods (bacon! goat!); her stories, her laugh, the hot-button issues that she was always ready to argue. Like anyone, she was made up of a million moving parts, but her heart was the steady, beating center of her, and she was incredibly generous with it. I can still remember my shock the day we heard that she had died. And somewhere in the memories and regrets and tears, I found myself wondering if you all knew, too. Which was absurd, of course, because you didn’t know her (she knew Colin Ferguson from university, and he knew just how much she loved Supernatural and especially Misha Collins’ Castiel), but it was unimaginable to me that people who had meant so much to her didn’t realize that she was gone.

Just like Bobby said on the show, family don’t end with blood. ita was family to so many of us, and a loud, proud member of the extended Supernatural family. It may not mean much to anyone but me, but I wanted you all to know her a little bit, and to understand what the show meant to her for so long. She would be so thrilled that it’s still going, and I know the Always Keep Fighting campaign would have resonated for her on a lot of levels. Thank you for that, and for letting me introduce you to ita.

That's lovely, Amy. I'm so glad you wrote it.

Amy, that was wonderful.

Amy, that is beautiful.

Beautiful, Amy.

So wonderful.

Thank you, Amy.

I can't reread it right now, but I will happily accept editing suggestions. I do plan to send it to the show, although I have to figure out how to do that (Bev?).

It feels like too much and not enough and mostly all wrong, because she shouldn't be gone.

Perfect, Amy.