Art imitating life - Debra RIP

While I was at work this morning a co-worker got a call--another associate of ours, Debra, had died this morning.

It took a while for me to get any details but apparently she died in her sleep and was found by her nine-year-old son this morning. My heart goes out to that poor boy.

This was someone who worked in my department, someone I've worked closely with on several projects over the years, so it's not like she wasn't someone I didn't know all that well. She loved the NBA and the NFL and we spent several hours over the years arguing about which team was better or what a team needed to do to win. I'm going to miss that, especially when football season finally kicks off again.

Still, it's especially uncomfortable for me, because that's sort of what my movie project, Seer, is about--death, unexpected, and our reactions to it. In fact there's a situation in it that's similar to what happened with Debra. While my sudden and personal experience with the subject matter can only help with my creation of the story, I would have preferred to maintain my more distant approach.

I'm sorry. Grief and shock make me awkward and wordy. I bottle the pain up and let it out a little bit at the time, over a long period. So people think I don't feel anything.

Deb, I'm gonna miss you. It's just not going to be the same.