Update
Kam came over this morning, and then came with me to Tacoma. My brother's travel agent took care of the tickets. We had a family gathering this afternoon, everyone together at the place where Grandma's living. (This was not the best possible time to introduce Kam to my family, but she handled it well, and they were pleased to meet her. I introduced her as "my sweetie" rather than, say, "one of my sweeties," because this did not seem like the right time to go into details of my romantic life. My family's been confused about my romantic life for years; why stop now? Come to think of it, this may be the first time that anyone in my family (other than my brother) has met anyone I've gone out with.)
Tomorrow, Jay and I will talk to the medical examiner, a funeral home, etc; we're hoping to arrange for some kind of memorial thing on Saturday. Our flights home are currently scheduled for Sunday, but that could change. (Um, for the time being all occurrences of "Jay" will refer to my brother.)
At some point if we can deal with it we may go by Peter's house. There was a lot of smoke damage to papers, books, photos, etc; I'm told it's very hard to clean up smoke damage. We'll see.
Everyone's still kind of in shock, I think. I certainly am.
Thank you for all the comments, in email and here in the journal. And the phone calls. I probably won't be responding to email and comments and may not respond to phone calls, but they're all appreciated. One thing I'm slowly learning (from both sides, lately) is that condolences do help, at least a little, even though when I'm the one giving them I often feel like I'm being trite. So, thank you all.
I'm posting this from a Kinko's near the motel we're staying in. Internet is a hard addiction to kick. But I probably won't be online more than once or twice a day, if that, and I almost certainly won't be responding to email or posted comments. Susan and Karen have stepped in to handle various magazine-related things I was in the middle of; thank you, S&K. If anyone's waiting on me for magazine-related things, write to fiction@ and S&K will handle it.
I'm really uncertain about whether to post a link to a news story or not. I've finally decided to post it, basically because I know I'm going to have to answer the question "What happened?" a lot over the coming weeks, and I'd rather people know without my having to tell them. Unfortunately, the only article I've found so far leaves out a lot of pertinent info, but it'll do for a start. If I find a more complete one in coming days, I may post another link. Or I may not.
I know the article leaves many questions unanswered, and I know it'll probably make y'all curious. I'd like to ask that you not ask me questions about it, at least not in electronic form, at least not for the time being. I'll probably give more information at some point, but I can't deal with it right now.
I'm having a very hard time expressing myself right now. I feel like there's all sorts of things I should be saying here that I'm not, but this'll have to do.
Okay, it's time for me to go to bed. Tomorrow's going to be a long day.
Thank you, all of you.
