Hello all,

I'm writing about Jennifer Reimer again. Some friends have found it odd that I've put together so much public material about her. Privacy around one's passing makes alot of sense for some - however, if you take a look at Jen's website Practice of Madness, you'll find that she made almost all of her life public. Her gripes with her father, her mourning for her mom, whatever was plaguing her mentally, addiction and her physical illnesses - it was all for public display. I also seriously need to get this out for my own good.

As time has gone on and it has now been over a month - a sharper image comes in to my head of Jennifer. Jen had a calendar of nearly all of her major life events, good and bad. Relationships gone wrong, graduating college, finishing graduate school, her homeless period, surviving endometriosis through surgery in 2011 (though I have suspicions, after research, that that was lingering ready to return) and meeting me online in 2010. Jen's life was and is an open book. Her website has over 3,000 likes on FB and she maintained a strong readership at other sites like Expats Post.

As many smiles as she had while she was with me and as happy as people have told me she was, she was visibly ill. It was heartbreaking. She only weighed 100 pounds and was taller than me. She was in debilitating pain and it was a symphony of differing elements to really figure out what was going on with her. The primary cure that she desired, pain medication, is very dangerous and highly regulated in Washington state. It was so hard to figure out what to do for her. Here's the two of us together at Starbucks:

I finally had the willpower to go through her images today on Facebook. Her dad had told me that she was actually very healthy back when she lived in Winnipeg, where he lives, and that they had even gone on long treks through the mountains together. At the many dozens of doctor's appointments we went to - it was clear that doctors were freaked out by how frail she had become. Jen would say she has always been that skinny - perhaps she was in denial about her own deterioration, I'm not really sure.

One of my mom's friends was very helpful in telling me about his mother in law, who was deteriorating due to cancer and he and his wife found that they could do very little for her to help her. That feeling of impotence and hurtling towards physical and emotional apocalypse is something I fully understand now - Jen was in a fairly safe neighborhood and safe situation and still couldn't be rescued no matter how hard I tried.

It was hard to fathom - given how fragile her state was with me, but older images show a gorgeous and physically robust woman (not that she wasn't gorgeous right up to the end):

So beautiful. Love you sweetheart.