Caroline--Dedication

Some of you know that my friend Caroline Thompson died of an overdose January 6th. I still don't know what exactly happened, and it is a terrible loss to everyone. Before she left us, I had just been offered publication in a journal called Blood Lotus Journal---it will be my piece Try Stuff--it's somewhere on this blog. I wrote to Caroline or called her and told her to submit. Then, she died. Her father recently wrote to me and said her poem On a Drawing of How to Kill Sam Pink was accepted and what did I think of the journal. I told him it was a great journal up that gets looked at by the Pushcart people and they give chances to many amazing new writers--in other words I told him what I knew--please accept. I will be in that same journal with her, so I wrote to the editor and asked him to make sure we were going to really be together in the same issue. She was a poet, and he is the fiction editor, so it took a few hours to figure it out. But, he wrote to me sincerely offering his condolences for the loss of this friend and wonderful writer, and asked if I would like to say anything on her behalf--of course I would, but what could I say? Her poetry is a work of genius? That she was a beautiful human who made me laugh at myself? What? So, I wrote a small dedication and it took me awhile to come up with something that made sense and didn't sound trite. Death is confusing, I'm still sad over it and I didn't want to be indulgent--I want Caroline to be remembered. So, the following will appear in the next issue of Blood Lotus Journal as a dedication to our friend Caroline Thompson. We fucking miss your guts, my dear and you will not be forgotten. 

Caroline Thompson was my friend and fellow writer. She died on January 6th of an overdose that for sure was accidental. I know Caroline’s choice those final days resulted from the thing most of us as writers deal with, an overwhelming sensitivity to the harshness of day to day reality and that she just wanted peace for one second from the brain that she was gifted with. Unfortunately the wrong mixture ended her life and broke our hearts. She was a wonderfully inappropriately funny human who wrote about the absurdity of life in a way that was remarkably disturbed and poignant. I miss her terribly. You can find her work at http://carolineruththompson.wordpress.com <http://carolineruththompson.wordpress.com/> . And who am I? Just another contributor to Blood Lotus Journal. I am honored to be printed in the same edition as my dear friend. I wish you all could have met her. She would have made you laugh your guts out. This little blurb is in her memory and to remind all of us who struggle with such things: life is beautiful, hard and incomprehensibly short. So, do what you love and be yourself and stay alive. Your invisible friend, Lisa Douglass.