In Memory of Kay Lillibridge...

Kay Lillibridge was born on August 5, 1969 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She grew up in Saratoga Springs, New York and attended Cornell University. Kay moved to San Francisco in 1995. She passed away on July 31, 2003 in San Francisco from a blood clot in her lung.

I met Kay when we were both freshmen at Cornell in the fall of 1987. We were both assigned to the same dorm, the music themed Sperry Hall (or U-Hall 6 as it was known to us older Cornellians). I don't know about Kay, but I ended up at Sperry because I turned in my housing application late, and the only other housing alternative was a long walk from campus. Although I griped about it at the time, the assignment turned out to be a blessing. I made several life-long friends at Sperry, with Kay being one of the most important ones.

I still remember the first time I met Kay. It was the first weekend at Cornell and mostly everyone was going pretty wild, especially so in our popular music dorm. I happened to walk by the fourth floor lounge, and I saw this brown hair girl sitting quietly in the corner, amidst all this racket, actually reading a book! As I walked over to her, I noticed that she was reading a Star Trek novel, The Romulan Way. Being a Trek fan myself, I introduced myself to her and we started chatting. And thus began a friendship that would take us across an ocean of years to the present, and from the east coast across the country to the west coast...

Kay loved cats. Her life was filled with cats and cat memorabilias. She had cat pictures, cat posters, cat notebooks, cat mugs, cat calendars, cat screensavers, cat toys, and an actual cat named Melisande whom she adored. The empty spaces in her place were invariably filled with Mel's toys and whatever structure that Kay had built out of cardboard for Mel to play with that week.

Kay had volunteered at the San Francisco SPCA, where she adopted Mel. Kay knew all the cats along her daily routes and would stop and say hi to the kitties if they were around. She also had an uncanny ability to spot cats in all sorts of places when she walked through new neighborhoods. Many times, I would be walking along side her, and she'd make a remark about a cat that she sees two buildings down and three stories up. It would take me minutes just to ascertain that the smudge off in the distance was actually a cat. I never did figure out how she was able to do that.

Kay was very interested in Japanese culture. She studied Japanese at Cornell and even spent a year living in Japan during her Cornell days. Her favorite Japanese restaurant in San Francisco was Izumiya in Japantown. She would always order the curry dish. And she always got a kick out of occasionally surprising the waiters by answering them in Japanese.

Part of her interest in Japan, I think, came from her strong interest in anime. She was definitely an avid anime fan. During our freshman year at Cornell, she wanted to find other anime fans on campus. And finding that there was no anime club, she co-founded the Cornell Japanimation Society which still exists (as Cornell Japanese Animation Society) and is quite active today. In her early college days, she went by the nickname 'Harlock' on Internet Relay Chat, named after the space pirate Captain Harlock from an anime series.

Kay was a bibliophile and had a deep love for books of all kinds. She liked reading fantasy, science fiction, history, and of course books about cats and Japan. Kay would never pass up a chance to browse through a book store. Once, she told me that she would love to open a nice little used book store and stock it with books that she liked. I think she would have been great at it. For a web design class, she designed a little web storefront for her bookstore Melisande's Books.

Kay loved chocolate, and ice cream, and of course chocolate ice cream. She was partial to Ben and Jerry. And we never went to Pier 39 in San Francisco without a visit into Ghiradelli's and trying one of their sumptuous and rich chocolate fudges.

Her favorite color was green, so she always had different kinds of green weaved through the tapestry of her life. Sometimes I think if cats came in green, she would have gotten one.

There was an interior decorator buried deep inside Kay somewhere. She admired Ethan Allen furnitures, and she enjoyed going through Bed Bath & Beyond and Ikea to find the little knick-knacks to put the right finishes in her home. She had a good eye for seeing where furniture should go, how to match colors, and what kinds of little small finishing touches were needed to give a living space the feeling of home. She always had good suggestions for me on what I can do with my place. And going through her apartment, you could see numerous small touches she added here and there to make it feel like home: a dream catcher here, a hanging bird mobile there... You definitely got the impression that her home was decorated with love and cared for tenderly.

Kay was an extremely kind and considerate person. She was always doing little things here and there to help people. Little by little, bit by bit, Kay worked to make this world a warmer and friendlier place to live. I can honestly say that in all the places that I have lived, and of all the people that I have known, I have never met anyone more generous than Kay. Kay's not the type to draw attention to herself, and her acts were not necessarily any major or earthshattering. But the fact that doing good deeds was such an intrinsic part of her life, and that she did so many of them with such complete sincerity, meant that she left a trail of goodness behind her as she went about her life. Kay was exceptionally unique in that respect.

I will miss Kay very much. I will miss catching the latest sci-fi movie with her and discussing it endlessly afterwards. We were both looking forward to seeing together the third movies in the Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and Matrix trilogies. I will miss her exasperated sighs at the messiness in my home and the piles of frozen food in my freezer. I will miss her unflagging attempts to make an interior decorator out of me and getting some vegetables into my diet. I will miss listening to her tell me tales about the different landmarks as we stroll through the city. And I will miss having her trying to introduce me to all sorts of new things in life.

There are lots to see and do around San Francisco, and many of the attractions I have experienced only because of Kay. I never thought that the Dickens Christmas Fair could be so much fun, even if neither of us could get the "Bow-wow" song out of our heads for days after. Or dressing up at a Renassiance Fair and speaking in olde English could have its charms. Or even that navigating through the San Francisco MUNI system through a confusing network of buses and trains could be a memorable experience, if you were with an experienced guide who knew all the shortcuts...

I'll never forget all the adventures we had year after year trying to get home after watching the July Fourth fireworks at the waterfront. Or all the late night meals at the JT's Diner on the corner of 19th and Taraval when she lived on Quintara. Or all the various fairs and festivals and parades around the Bay Area that we have attended over the years...

There are so many places we have been to together in the Bay Area that it will be hard for me to find a place that does not remind me of some memory that we share. As I sip a drink while sitting at a sidewalk cafe on a sunny afternoon, I will think of her. When I watch a sunset over the Pacific from the Marin headlands, I will think of her. And the next time I find myself travelling on a MUNI bus, without any whispers in my ear about stories of the buildings passing outside the window, I will most certainly think of her.

Kay was a true and dear friend. I will always remember her.

Jerry

More pictures of Kay.

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