Our friend Marinda recently lost her battle with cancer and I want to reflect on some of the memories we had together over the years. Our friendship spanned half her lifetime (though not quite half of mine). We met at Capricon, her first time attending a Chicagoland convention and my second year at that particular one. (She went on to chair that Capricon a few years ago.) We hit it off immediately, bonding over gaming, our niblings (we each only had one niece or nephew at the time), and our black cats.
When we met, she did demos or organized tournaments for one gaming company; we both soon joined the demo team for Steve Jackson Games, teaching many people the joys of Munchkin, Chez Geek, and other games. We were fixtures of the daytime gaming room at many local conventions, leaving our evening hours open to attend the parties. When I decided to hold my bachelorette party at a Capricon, she coordinated with the convention to book a room, and she helped me organize my first baby shower (the friends rather than family one) at a DucKon. She was the obvious choice to be my daughter’s godmother, and the only person other than my ex-husband and myself who was told the probable gender of the child before her birth.
Over the years, Marinda volunteered or worked for several well-known companies in the gaming industry, including her stint with True Dungeon that resulted in a middle-of-the-night text message to me saying “I killed Wil Wheaton!” (He mentioned it here.) The funny thing is she wasn’t a Trekkie and barely knew who he was at that point, but knew that I was a fan. She recruited me as her gaming co-chair for the now defunct To Be Continued convention, where we added “gaming with the guests” our second year, selecting games appropriate for the roles the media guests were known for. I talked her into co-chairing Dorkstock the year my daughter was born, knowing I’d need the extra pair of hands with an infant in tow.
We were founding members of The Lady Gamer, a fan-run webzine, and attended the GAMA Trade Show with press badges together in 2004. (All of the content we produced from 2004-2007 is still available.) That year, we also organized a scavenger hunt of GenCon’s dealer’s hall (under the Fantasy Aspirations banner) with prizes from an assortment of vendors; Marinda was the primary contact for the vendors, helping them develop appropriate clues for the hunt.
I’ve only made it to GenCon a couple times since my daughter was born, each while Marinda was volunteering or working for Mayfair Games. She recruited my daughter to pull winning raffle tickets; every player got one for every demo they played at the company’s booth, giving them the opportunity to win… games! She took her goddaughter to Little Wars one year, a convention I’ve never managed to get to.
We saw Marinda outside conventions too, of course. There was a year when I was working part-time from home and she was renting an apartment a couple miles from our house when we’d randomly schedule lunches. She had a key to our house, and I knew if someone randomly let themselves in during my work day, it was her. When I bought this house, she extended her visit by a couple days and supervised an electrician doing some rewiring while I was at work. She’d pretty much help anyone who needed it, even when it was physical labor that her illnesses, including cancer these last couple years, should have prevented her from doing.
She is everywhere around us. I went to Walgreens the other day and realized we had stopped at that McDonald’s across the street once, after exploring an area park for Pokemon Go (me) and Ingress (her). On my drive home, I passed a forest preserve that we had ventured into for similar reasons (where a guy passing on a bike asked if my daughter and I were twins), and the restaurant, Harner’s Bakery, where we took her to lunch when she visited in June before dropping her off at the nearby Metra station.
There are cat toys she brought over scattered about – one in particular that was rejected by her cat, Kelethin, and excitedly received by all four cats here. There are toys and board games she gifted us, yarn choices that she weighed in on for my never-ending crochet projects, and postcards from her travels reminding us that friendship is not limited by geography.
She’s in my kitchen every time I make an omelet, which she loved, joining the memories of my father who taught me how to make them. The brands of pizza sauce and mustard, carefully selected to avoid her pepper allergy (hint: paprika is made from peppers, and frequently disguised as “spices” on food labels) remind me of her. She recommended our rice cooker, with a locking lid, for slow cooking after Arwen discovered she could open our Crockpot. There’s a slight smile when I put the cast iron pan into the microwave – to keep it safe from cats while cooking in the oven – remembering Marinda’s freaked out expression the first time she saw me do that.
Marinda is gone now, her internment is this weekend. Our memories of her live on.