I sent Lit an email to check that he's OK. It's not like him to just disappear.
Speaking of private communication, I received an email from the widow of a friend who died some ten years ago, checking up on how I am. It turns out she has been following me on various professional sites to see how I'm doing.
I worked together with him for years and we got to be close friends. He was a tech writer and editor, and we wrote a lot of stuff together. Most of the Ericsson style guide, used all over the company to explain how their manuals should be written, is our work. I'd edit his texts and he'd edit mine, and improved content would result.
His wife is an army doctor, now retired, who moved around a lot, so he'd follow. While he was originally from Vancouver and she from PA, I think, they'd be living in all kinds of places, Japan one year, Virgina the next, and he'd work from wherever he was, frequently visiting Sweden and staying a couple of nights with us every now and then.
Then, ten years ago, they went on holiday to the Galápagos Islands, scuba-diving among the turtles. Now, we had been emailing back and forth, writing a script together, and one night I got another reply from him.
Except it wasn't him. It was his wife, telling me that he'd disappeared during a dive. The found him after some time and she, being a doctor, spent 90 minutes trying to resuscitate him.
She was too late.
I still miss him a lot. This morning's email brought it all back and now I'm feeling really sad and really down.
