Last night I learned that my friend Eve Grace died in July. She was diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia in June and died one month later. Eve was someone I met when I first moved to Portland in 1996. I joined a group of people interested in co-housing and Eve was one of the members. We both eventually dropped out of the co-housing group, but we remained friends.

One of the things we had in common was an interest in investing and in planning for an early retirement. A long while back, we met regularly for an investment group. Eve’s house was fully paid off and she was very good with money. I don’t remember exactly when she planned to retire, but it was within a year or two.

We had both read the book Your Money or Your Life and Eve embraced the money saving ideas presented in the book. I delighted every year when I received a Christmas card from Eve with 4 or more recycled stamps pasted to the envelope. That was something I used to do back in my starving graduate student days – look for letters where the stamps hadn’t been cancelled and then carefully steam them off – and it was the kind of thing that Eve loved. She was proud of the money she had saved for her retirement and enjoyed getting a bargain and finding ways to save money. Eve was frugal but not cheap and she was definitely generous. I so admired Eve’s wisdom and life plan and loved to talk to her about finances and money.

When I met Eve she was very overweight to the point where it affected her ability to live her life. In November of 2001 she had gastric bypass surgery. She stuck vigilantly to the eating rules that go along with a bypass surgery and lost a tremendous amount of weight. She became much more active and I think she really was able to live life fully in what would turn out to be her last five years. She became very active in the Red Hat Society and enjoyed it tremendously. The last time I saw her was a year ago on New Year’s Eve. We had a party at our house and she came decked out in her Red Hat purple and red.

I feel tremendously sad this morning – sad that I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye and even more sad that such a wonderful woman who had overcome such adversity in her life was cut short at the age of 57. I thought about her all night last night and woke up thinking about her and found that I couldn’t just sit down and get to work this morning. There were no obituaries published for Eve, so I wanted to put this out here. Eve was not a friend I saw with great frequency, but I will miss her greatly.