On Monday I went to a memorial service for Suzy Smith, a friend and former co-worker. Suzy and I chatted over e-mail regularly, mostly about new Mac products, but more recently about some treatments in clinical trials for curing metastatic lung cancer.
Suzy was a Mac fanatic, an appellation she’d happily accept. It was really quite a curious memorial service with so many stories about her love of the Mac, and it wasn’t just because the Chapel was half-full of IT department workers. There’s something interesting about it beyond Suzy – I can’t imagine a similar scenario where you could replace Mac with Windows or even Linux and get so many warm smiles from a group. Suzy would have had lots of reasons to explain why this was true. If I were faster thinking, I would have sent a bouquet of flowers stuffed inside a Compact Mac case (alas, I think of these things too late).
Tonight I had the sad duty of deleting Suzy from my Buddy list and her vCard from my Address Book. But it’s an OSX Address Book, so she’d be OK with it.
Her family asked callers to the reception to take a ring from Suzy’s vast collection. I picked one out for Emma with flowers, in three kinds of gold, and we’ll have that remembrence of her for many years to come. Her sister said they didn’t know what to do with a hundred rings. I reassured her that what they chose to do was great, making a hundred people happy, something Suzy would have liked maybe even more than a new iLife release.
Photo: two coworkers decided, independently, to make 6-colored Apple cookies for the reception.