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5/02/2013

Happy Birthday, Keavy

There are strange moments in life where you meet people and connect instantly, with full heart and no doubt. Your instinct gives you no warning signals, your guts tell you you just want to be "best friend forever" with this person, and you open yourself immediately. 

That's the way i felt when i met Keavy some years ago. We were both volunteering to help organize an international conference in Lille on gender, science and technology, and we shared the same dorm. While the other girls were hard to catch, Keav was immediately ready for fun and story sharing, and so i fell in love with her.

The conference was a week long, and took place in July 2008. Since then we've managed to keep in touch via Facebook (what a great invention for such stories) which would inform one another on her life in the US, on mine in Europe. Pictures, birthday wishes, after all, even though there were no real discussions, it was enough by then to know the other person was there.

Like every year, Facebook tells me today is her birthday. So I go onto her wall, write birthday wishes, and send her my "warmest hugs from Dubai". Having some time I also decide to check her latest pictures, then read the messages people left. Until I understand the clear truth.

Keavy has died. And I had no idea.

I searched a little, to learn she died in a plane accident (she was a pilot).  I got of course very sad and nostalgic, but then smiled immensely: Keav loved flying, she experienced her passion and shared it with her beloved ones until the end.

What angered me the most, however, is to realize the accident did not happen recently. She died in July 2011, almost 2 years ago. And I had no idea.

Since then, someone had been posting on her wall, on her behalf. New pictures, some links. What i thought was just updates on her life ended up being  a page for people to remember, to write, to mourn. And that just hurt me more in a way than knowing she had gone.

In view of my current loss, and of the information I have posted myself on Facebook to share sad news with people I do not know, I feel angry at myself too. Soon I will close my sister's page, to prevent such terrible misunderstanding from happening again. Remembering a lost one should go beyond a page on a website.

Keavy would be 27 today. Happy birthday, girl.