That it was expected doesn't make it hurt less.
I have known for a long time that Madeleine L'Engle was not well -- friends of friends corresponded with her and had passed along the word that she was failing, and they gently suggested to me that perhaps I should not get my hopes up that there would be another book in the Time series or the Austin series, but I just practiced a sunny denial and kept checking the shelves at the bookstore and thinking that she couldn't die, because I still needed to know how the story ended.
I loved her books -- A Wrinkle in Time, of course, and A Ring of Endless Light, but A House Like a Lotus, and An Acceptable Time, and A Severed Wasp, and A Circle of Quiet, and all of them, really, books that I would read over and over again. I have, in fact, four copies of Wrinkle if you count the audiobook version my mother bought for Isabelle last Christmas. I loved her characters -- Meg and Calvin and Charles Wallace, and Vicky and Adam and Polly and Zachary, Katherine and Felix and Camilla, all of them so real and flawed and wonderful that you wanted them as friends. I loved her places -- the Murray farmhouse/Crosswicks and St. John's, in particular. I loved her voice and her themes and her lessons. And now she is gone, and there will be no more stories, and it breaks my heart. I cannot think of another author whose death would sadden me so much. The world seems dimmer and poorer because she is gone.
