Rest in Peace, Kit

  I rarely check my Facebook notifications. I just found out today how much I truly suck at it.
Years ago, when I first got back on Facebook, I made friends with Kit Frazier (real name Cyndee Katherine DuHadaway). She was a fellow mystery novelist who'd created Cauley MacKinnon (ironically, an obituary writer) and we took to each other immediately. We'd quickly begun DMing each other. She was out of Austin. Texas at the time then by 2018, our conversations started taking a darker turn.
According to Kit, she was getting sent by the US government to all these hotspots all over the world. Russia. Ukraine. Places like that. She wasn't just a fellow mystery novelist but a photojournalist, which was got her sent to these dangerous places. I still don't understand why the US government was sending her to these places. But, while she was close-mouthed about what and why she was actually overseas, she'd begun speaking of handlers and babysitters, people whose job it was to look out for her life. In other words, real Jason Bourne spy shit.
Kit was one of those people we meet occasionally in our lives that had an element of strangeness to it either because they solicit that strangeness, like Andrew Vachss (Probably Barbara's favorite novelist ever), or because the strangeness enveloped their lives without invitation. I still don't wholeheartedly believe that Kit was on these various missions all over the world but the fact was, she never gave me the impression she lived in a fantasy world or lied to people as a matter of course. She wasn't a cat fisher.
During our chats, which ended in 2018, we'd made loose plans we both knew we'd never realize, like my going to Austin, Texas so she could take me to a great indie bookstore in that city. I even bought one of her books, which I never had the chance to read. Then, one day in October 2018, she just blipped out and I never heard from her again.
Her birthday was two days ago and that's how I found out she'd died nearly four and a half years ago. I finally checked my Facebook notifications and noticed that Kit's birthday was two days ago. The funny thing was, I was thinking about Kit within the last week and wondered what had become of her, at what she was up to now.
So I sent a pre-written birthday wish she'd never read then went to her wall and that's when I got the news.
It started out ominously. People wrote comments on her wall over the years saying how she would've loved this and that. Another mutual friend had died. Someone wanted Kit to show her around in heaven. Oh no.
I kept scrolling down her wall and finally arrived at the announcement that she had passed away the day before, June 5, 2020, surrounded by family. I still don't know what had killed her. But whatever the circumstances, she'd left this earth way too young.
She was an unnaturally beautiful woman both inside and out, her blonde hair almost always up in a girlish, high ponytail. She loved her dogs, her kids, her friends. And, for the rest of my life, I'm going to wonder if the shit the government made her do six years ago contributed to her death. If you read our private conversations, you'd immediately see it was weird hugger-mugger shit.
This one really hurts because Kit and I liked each other so much. We saw in each other a kindred spirit, in some ineffable, indefinable way. And the world is so much poorer in the wake of her very untimely passing.