Making Time for Someday - A Remembrance of Kathy Wentworth
Last year, my husband J received news that a friend of his from high school had died in a car accident. It was a sobering incident, as things of that sort always are; the friend had left behind two young daughters as well as a host of people who had loved him and had had their lives touched by him in some fashion. J hadn’t been in contact with the friend for years, but reaching out to other people we knew who were close to both us and to the friend, we all felt the awareness of looming mortality that accompanies a death happening sooner than we think it should.
J didn’t want to go to the funeral. He felt like he would be intruding, like his grief over his friend’s death - which was as much about the shock of being reminded of human vulnerability, of the fact that death doesn’t only happen to “other people” that we don’t know, as it was his sincere sadness for his friend - was less legitimate than that of others who had stayed in more constant touch. I didn’t truly understand his reasoning. I thought that even though the friend’s family might not recognize or remember J, the other people we were close to would know, and would appreciate his presence as a token of solidarity for the loss that everyone in the social group felt. But I didn’t press him on it at the time.
A few weeks ago, I found out that Kathy Wentworth had passed away. I felt and still feel an enormous amount of sorrow at her passing. Over the years I had fallen in and out of contact with Kathy and other friends from the writers’ group I met her through, and I had only recently gotten back in touch with her via Facebook - I didn’t know anything about her illness. I had told myself that someday, I would get back to Tulsa and make time to meet up with the friends there - Kathy included - and catch up on what was happening. Someday I would send her a long letter or an email. Someday I would tell her, not just how glad I was to have found her again online (which I did tell her, in the set of cheerful messages we exchanged upon the sending and accepting of the Facebook friend request) but how much I appreciated her past kindness and encouragement and how much it had meant to me as part of one of the few bright spots in what wasn’t a very pleasant time in my life.
Obviously, that particular someday never came.
I met Kathy, who wrote under the name KD Wentworth, through the Oklahoma Science Fiction Writers group in the late 1990s. I was a lonely, scared and unhappy young girl who had just moved from a city in which I had been surrounded by many close friends and fun things to do to a new town in a new state where for the first time, unlike the many other places I lived growing up as a military brat, I was never able to quite find a niche to fit into. I couldn’t have been more than seventeen (maybe even sixteen) when I came to my first OSFW meeting. During that meeting and the others that I attended, while I met a lot of wonderful and talented people that I still know and love, Kathy was one of the first people I admired and felt comfortable with. She was someone that almost all of the group admired and felt comfortable with. I remember feeling that if I could get up the nerve to share my writing with others, I could especially trust her to be honest about ways my work could be improved but also to be gentle in how she imparted her suggestions - and I knew that whether or not I brought anything to read, she was someone who would make me feel welcome, and encourage me to be part of the group in whatever capacity I wanted. When I got my parents’ OK to host a meeting at our house, I found out (years later) that Kathy had carefully contacted the other core group members beforehand to make sure no one would read anything that might upset my parents and cause them to keep me from continuing participation in the group, though her efforts to herd the OSFW cats weren’t entirely successful. (Somewhat fortunately, once my mother’s terrier leaped completely unprovoked into Brad Sinor’s lap and bit his nose, my parents removed themselves and the dog to another part of the house and missed out on the reading of the single “questionable” piece.)
As it has a habit of doing, life has taken me on paths that I hadn’t anticipated, some of which I enjoy and others less so. College and work and life both romantic and mundane have taken over for the last several years. Friends are still much loved and important to me, but the multitude of daily urgencies monopolizes the resources I have to share with them. Likewise, daily duties have monopolized the writing that I used to love, morphing it into a tool first to get me through school and later to help me with my work as a museum worker/librarian/archivist. Finding the time, the energy and the confidence to write creatively has been something that has been given a spot on my “someday” list for longer than I like to admit. Someday, when things are less hectic at work, when I’m sleeping better, when we’ve settled into the new house, when any number of things happen, I’ll make time to sit down and pick an idea off the list I’ve been keeping and start writing my stories again.
Here’s the thing about Kathy, though. She was someone who helped people - a whole lot of people - reach their somedays. Looking at all the Facebook posts, hearing about the thousands of letters to the Writers of the Future from the multitude of aspiring writers and enthusiastic friends of the science fiction genre whose lives she touched, it’s pretty clear to see that Kathy’s warmth and encouragement gave a lot of people the courage to finally act on their hopes and put those words on the page… to move from the ever-elusive someday to the clear and present today. That’s a rare feat, and it takes someone as special as Kathy to spark that flame not only for herself, but also for a multitude of others.
As I have read the responses of friends and of strangers to Kathy’s passing, I now understand my husband’s reluctance to participate in the mourning of his own friend. I see the reminiscences and the grief of others who knew her better, who saw her more recently, who acted on Kathy’s encouragement to a greater degree than I did, and it does indeed feel that my own sadness pales in comparison. In part because of these feelings, I didn’t attend her funeral, and it makes me even sadder that I missed a chance to come together with old friends to celebrate her life. I almost didn’t even write these words, and as I write them I am not sure where they are going to go. I fear that for a lot of Kathy’s friends and family and closer acquaintances, their evolving sorrow might have moved on to a stage where further expressions of loss might not be welcomed or might reopen the wounds left by her absence. I am myself in the midst of a very tumultuous personal time, and it has been too easy to put off mourning for Kathy and for the part of my life that she brightened until that someday when things settle down. But as I have been remembering her, I feel that the best tribute I can pay to her is to make time today for the someday. I think that is a tribute that everyone who knew Kathy can make in her memory: to help someone reach for a someday, even if that someone is oneself. So in that light, here are these words to Kathy and to other people who loved her.
Kathy, I am so glad I knew you. I miss you. I regret not taking the time to reach out to you more often. I wish you peace.
With boundless affection,
Terri Jordan (Terri Qualls)
May 2012