Janet is gone, much too soon. I found out today, from Suzi, who found out from Jane, and from Tina, who wanted me to let Timmy and Mary Joye and Judy know. Janet was our friend, our mentor, our teacher, the woman wo brought all of us together, and without whom we would have never met.

Janet was a writer, and she fit every bit the cliché of a writer. Born in Southern Virginia into an affluent family and raised by a black nanny, she set off to New York in her Twenties and wrote over twenty non-fiction books for a big publishing house. Then she set her sights on Paris and landed a job there. 

She’d already given up her NYC apartment when her departure to Paris was stalled for a couple of months. She took up a friend’s offer to bite the time until her departure in their cabin in Vermont, intending to do some serious writing there. 

Then Frank, a local carpenter, knocked on the door of the cabin to do some repairs, and they instantly fell in love. She ditched Paris, married the carpenter, they had two children, built their own cabin, and she became a housewife in Vermont, a housewife who always kept writing.

When the kids were grown and the marriage ended in divorce, she revisited her Paris dreams. She became a cosmopolitan writer, renting out her cabin in Vermont over the winter while she spent time in Paris and Greece. She wrote three best-selling crime novels set in French wine country, traveled incessantly, sat out the pandemic on an island in Greece, and she started teaching writer’s workshops at a ranch in Wyoming and in France. 

As a mentor, she was always supportive, always accessible, always available.  She was funny as hell and very secretive about her age, until a few weeks ago, when the shocking email arrived. 

The picture in the email showed Janet in a wagon-wheel sized hat, dancing in a barn in Vermont, and she told us that when her friends threw her the party for her 80^th birthday and she was dancing to Abba’s “Dancing Queen”, she felt that she had another 20 years to go. Three days later, she found out that the abdominal pain that had been diagnosed as a pulled muscle was in fact Stage IV terminal cancer.

In typical Janet fashion, she wrote “I guess I won’t be an old woman after all” and worried about doing publicity for her latest book, to be published this month. She worked with a healer and a spiritual guide, and she accepted her fate with grace, surrounded by supportive family and friends.

She requested a traditional burial, and she will be buried on her beloved property in her beloved Vermont, in a casket that Frank, the carpenter ex-husband, built for her.

Her book will be published on September 17. The title is “The Eloquence of Grief.”