My cousin Wanda died at the age of 47 on Wednesday. I don’t know details beyond that, but in keeping with modern times I found out online, rather than via a call, and from my cousin’s elder daughter, rather than from my mother.

It strikes me as dreadfully young, and that makes me sadder, as tends to be true of less expected and less “appropriate.”

For all Valerie uncannily resembles my father’s mother’s family (”the Foster/Washburn look”), she has often reminded me almost eerily of Wanda, who was my mother’s late older brother’s daughter (not sure if that’d be more Irving/Johnston or Tranmer/Howland, but I believe it’s the former).

There’s also one particular scene in an episode of Firefly in which Jewel Staite, playing Kaylee, looks just like Wanda to me. Enough to always take me out of the story and make me think of her. Which I suppose makes a funny sort of connection, since we only mostly jokingly considered Kaylee as a name for Valerie.

I’m actually completing this post the next day. Kids. Still have no further details, and still haven’t talked to my mother. Neither here nor there, apart from being unexpected.