As many of you know, I lost my best friend, Alexandra Christle, back in October. Those who know me well know that I have struggled with that loss for months, not wishing to believe she was actually gone. And so I have put off publishing an In Memoriam post on my blog for her. Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt.

However, with the year ending, I feel I need to honor Alex once more during the year in which she left us.

The following is part of the eulogy I delivered at Alex’s memorial service, which I almost got through without shedding tears. Almost. For those of you who knew her or read and loved her works, I hope you will remember her again with love and kindness.

I would like to thank everyone for coming here today to help celebrate the life of our dear friend, Alexandra Christle. I knew her primarily through her career as a writer, so that is what I can speak to best.

I have to admit I was surprised to discover that Alex and I met only a little over ten years ago. It really feels as though I knew her all my life, and it has been all my writing life. We both joined Chesapeake Romance Writers on the same day. I remember clearly she was sitting to my right side and when she introduced herself she said she’d been a writer twenty years before, stopped, and now wanted to restart her career as a writer. She had about ten or fifteen books that she’d written and now wanted to revise. I remember being terribly impressed by that, and I have continued to be impressed by Alex’s prowess as a writer ever since.

She was a fabulously talented writer, penning two books of which she was inordinately proud (with good reason), Between Nowhere and Lost and –. In 2018, Between Nowhere and Lost won the prestigious Maggie Award from the Georgia Romance Writers chapter of Romance Writers of America in the category Contemporary Romance (Long). And in 2019 won the James River Writers’ Best Self-Published Novel for Hitchin’.

Under her pen name, Talia Logan (taken from two of her grandchildren’s names) she published Deadly Chance, a romantic suspense thriller, and Treasure by the Sea, a beachy second chance romance. There were many more works that she was in the process of completing, but which will unfortunately remain unfinished. Alex was what we call a “pantser” which means she wrote by the seat of her pants, without an outline, writing a scene here, a scene there, and jumping from one project to another. I tried to keep her on task as much as possible—I would often get a text that said ROOOBIIINNN or DUCKIE!, I need help!—but she insisted on working at her own pace, which unfortunately slowed even more this past year.

I’m not exactly sure how or why we gravitated toward one another. We seemed to be opposite in almost every way. And maybe that’s what attracted us. That and our quirky sense of humor, one of the things we did share. I could always make her laugh and she could do the same for me. Both of our senses of humor were offbeat and dark at times, and so we naturally seemed drawn to one another. We roomed together at many conferences and writing retreats. Several years ago we began doing mini-writing retreats in January to get away and write and just enjoy one another’s company.

If I was Alex’s plot queen and sounding board, she was my grammar guru and best editor. For years she was my devoted beta reader, and even when her time constraints with her editing and writing schedules prohibited reading the whole manuscript, she’d read my 10-12 page outlines and give me feedback on those. The gigantic hole her passing has left in my writing life alone can never be filled. And I cannot begin to fathom how much I’m going to miss her in my life.

I will miss the laughter, the roll of her eyes, her hysterical facial expressions when she was agreeing to do something she didn’t particularly wish to do. I’ll miss her smile. I will miss our conversations about anything and everything—she was extremely intelligent and could talk on any number of topics. I will miss watching Jeopardy with her and yelling out the answers.  I will miss going out to eat with her. Our “place” for a long time had been Ruby Tuesday’s where we’d get huge salads from the salad bar and talk as we ate our way through them. More recently we’d go to her favorite Mexican restaurant, Plaza del Sol (she did love a marguerita!) and catch up on what had been going on in our lives.

I will miss everything about her.

After this last horrific year, during which she became less and less able to do the things she loved to do, I have to be glad she is now free of pain and at peace. I have to find comfort in the thought that she’s at the Rainbow Bridge now, reunited with two of the dogs she loved most, Tucker and Digger—about whom she’d started a book called Hounded, a murder mystery that the ghosts of the two dogs solve. It is cold comfort, but it’s the best I can manage. And Alex herself would probably say, “Get over it,” with her characteristic smirk. She was one to face things head on, and I will take a page from that book of hers. Her last gift to me. But no matter what I do, for the rest of my life, Alex will be in my heart, always.