My friend Mel Chua died this week.

I'm middle-aged now. I started this weblog as a young adult, and now it's been more than twenty years, and today I'm really feeling that change.

Nearly eleven years ago, I wrote,

Every few days I remember that Aaron is still dead. And I think I dreamt about my dad a few times in October; in one dream I got confused, thinking, "wait, I thought he died already, how could he be dying again?" but that's something you don't say to the rest of your family, or at least something I don't say. I think I've gotten to the long prairie of life where I'll be going to more funerals than weddings from here on out.

(Mel commented on that entry: "Thanks for writing the kind of poetry my soul particularly understands.")

I find fiction more engaging when it's about adult themes. Now, as soon as I say "adult themes" the connotation of sex springs up.

(There was a meal, during our walk across England, where I was trying to explain the appeal of Fifty Shades of Grey to Mel, who remained puzzled.) (That Coast-to-Coast journey was one of the best experiences of my life.) (Now I'm the only one who holds those memories.)

But I mean: mortality, stewarding and using institutional power, stuff like that. So I've been thinking about the TV show Halt And Catch Fire.

As I said a few years ago, it's:

the only TV show I know of that is realistic about programming and its social and economic context. An important relationship starts, and is repaired, when people help each other recover from data loss. People who think that just making good hardware/code is enough for a good career find that, unless you pay attention to intrapersonal, interpersonal, organizational, economic, and social issues, you might still be able to make a living, but your work is far more likely to go into the trashbin where no one will ever use it. And: so many office/work shows are basically about people who do the same jobs for a super long time. Halt and Catch Fire reflects the reality of how you run into the same people over and over in different companies and jobs and configurations, teammate, boss, investor, competitor, family, conference co-panellist, and you bring your past to it but you can also grow, especially thanks to the healing power of making stuff together.

(Mel and I met, we think -- they thought and I think, at a She's Such A Geek book event at Bluestockings, the feminist bookstore in Manhattan, in.... must have been 2006 or 2007. They recognized me because of the combination of something I said there and something I'd said on the Systers email list for women in tech. In the years after that, we got to directly collaborate a few times on work -- like when they analyzed how I was writing my 2012 Open Source Bridge keynote speech, and in their conceptualization-of-open-source-infrastructure project I mentioned when I celebrated Dr. Chua last year.)

(Even the act of hyperlinking to a past post of theirs or mine feels like a connection to my lost friend, now.)

(During that walk across England, there was one day in particular, on a hot dry walk up a steep hill, when we worked out a business model for something and talked seriously about cofounding it. There's a part of me that wishes we'd done that; right now part of me is just scrambling for counterfactuals that would have given me more time with them.)

I started working in the tech industry in 1998. And I appreciate -- and can feel bittersweet about -- something that I think the latter seasons of Halt and Catch Fire reflected:

Our intertwined complicated personal and professional experiences, over the course of decades....

(Did Mel ever see the show?) (Mel made comics and skits about engineering and education and engineering education. I'm trying to remember whether we talked about narrative art and its affordances and how it gives the audience a different pathway, what it's better at compared to other mediums and genres -- we must have. They stage-managed The Art of Python at PyCon US 2019. But we talked about so much. I don't remember.) (I wish I could remember it all.)

And our grief over rifts and losses. (And betrayals, and schisms, and pseudonymous hobby projects.) Complicated "unprofessional" experiences that add valence to our opinions of each other, envy, love.... The shadows that never get directly expressed on LinkedIn.

The hidden underground streams that emerge and submerge such that, on the surface, what others see only hints at what dynamics could have happened underneath to similarly influence seemingly far-flung people or groups, or to shape certain absences.

(How many people, in so many different fields, learned from Mel? Not just individual facts or skills, but ways of thinking, ways of being?) (They accumulated so many groups and so many people who delighted in them.) (Sometime soon I will meet someone and wish I could introduce them to Mel. It will feel incomprehensible and unfair that I can't. As though I am entitled to their presence in the world, as though such a bright spirit surely was exempt from death.)

Karl Fogel wrote in 2007 about "ghost works":

Ghost works are all the works that never get made in the first place, or are made but not released, because copyright concerns prevent them either from being started or from being distributed. Every project that dares not base itself on an orphan work becomes a ghost work, but there are many more ghost works beyond that. Indeed, it would be fair to say that today most works are ghost works. That is, most works either don’t exist or are not accessible, because copyright obstructs them. Whenever you walk into a bookstore, survey the shelves around you and imagine them to be 90% empty, for in a sense they are.

Mel was such a catalyst, both directly creating and inspiring so much delightful and needed change, art, work, and more. ("And more" might be the most frequent thing I end up writing when I write about Mel. There was always more. It is impossible to be comprehensive, to sum them up.) And now all we have are the ripple effects, which will propagate, but the source will never initiate any more of them, and I won't even know how many ghost works there would have been, if they'd lived.

They were so constitutive, do you understand? I have lost someone who helped make me who I am. Someone who understood me in a particular way no one else did, and whom I understood in a special way as well.

(I archived our Signal message history this week so it doesn't look back at me when I open the app. I'm never going to share a scifi story with them again and they're never going to delight in it.)

Maturity means recognizing that we may as well get good at the skills we're going to need to deploy a lot. I both do and don't want to get good at grief. I know grief is the cost of love and so the shadow of future grief hangs over the love in my life. Everyone I love is going to die. I'm going to die and the people I leave behind will be seized with pain, if they loved me, and I know some do.

Leonard said: this is the oldest pain there is, losing someone you love. Yeah. The poems and the songs, old and new, the love songs and the grief songs, actually mirror each other in trying to cope with utter disorientation and world-changing. Love songs say that it's incomprehensible that I had a life before you were in it. Grief songs say it's incomprehensible that you're no longer in it.

I am embarking on the part of my life where I can't have conversations with Mel anymore and it's awful. I keep writing words but none of them are enough.