Arwen

This is very sad.

Let me tell the personal story first.

Ever since I became old enough not to be one myself, I've enjoyed playing with small children. Fortunate I've been that for a period of thirty years, friends and acquaintances produced a steady supply of small children whose company I could enjoy, and then give them back to their parents afterwards. Much of this would go on at Mythcon, the locus of my acquaintance with many of the parents.

The eldest of all these children was a girl named Arwen. (Her parents were serious Tolkien fans.) At the one Mythcon I met her at, she was 5, I was 20. We played around in the garden of the campus where the meetings were, and formed our own meeting of the snails we found among the shrubs while her mother, an enthusiastic photographer, took photos. It's a cherished memory.

I'm not sure if I ever saw Arwen again after that, maybe briefly once or twice, though I did hear a bit about her doings. She became an art student, moved to the Boston area for some years, preferred to call herself Ari for a while. More recently she came back to LA whence she originally hailed and moved in with her mother and stepfather in their rambling home up at the tip of the Altadena hills.

Yes, what you're thinking. All of them lost everything in the fire. For Arwen, it was too much, and I've just learned that she took her own life at the age of 52.

What a tragedy. There's a lot of grief I'm feeling for someone I hardly knew, but I still remember the little girl in the garden among the snails.