I received an email this morning from Jennifer Swift‘s husband Timothy Bartel containing the details of her memorial service. He wrote:

The place, date and time of the main memorial service for Jennifer Swift (7 March 1955 30 September 2009) have been arranged:

As Jennifer made a substantial contribution to the work of so many charitable organisations, not least with her journalism, her family requests that donations should be made to one or more of these organisations in lieu of flowers. As I sift through her records, I shall compile a list of these charities and send it to you in due course.

I won’t be able to make the transatlantic trip, but I’m passing on this information for those who can or who already live nearby.

I hadn’t realized, until seeing this note containing her birthdate, that Jennifer and I were born the same month. She was only three weeks older than me.

Here’s another photo from the last time we were together, out for an Indian lunch during the 2005 Glasgow Worldcon. We would both have been 50 then.

Something about Jennifer that I forgot to mention in my previous post was how much I enjoyed what her voice had become. When I’d known her back at Clarion in 1979, she had, as I recall, a neutral U.S. accent that to my ear and memory seemed untraceable to any particular location. But after her decades spent living in Oxford, she sounded to me, someone who can’t accurately parse British accents, like Mary Poppins. It tickled me to hear her transformed like that during the few times we were able to meet post-Clarion.

I had hoped that during my upcoming trip to the World Horror Convention in Brighton I’d be able to get together with her to hear that voice again.

Have I taken the time to say lately that life’s just too damned short?