Our friend Veronica left us last Tuesday. Veronica was a wonderful friend, a person one could count on, for real. One who did not complain about things in life, and it was always ready for a lunch, a book discussion, a woman's march and/or anything else she thought was important.
You really had to know her very well to realize she was fighting a cancer for many years. She was a true engineer, very proud of her work on improving performance of systems (at Samsung), but she rarely talked to us about her work. We have a women's lunch, the BWITCH (something like `Brazilian Women in Tech' lunch), which, like so many of these meetings, sometimes increased, sometimes waned a bit, depending on how busy people were. Lately, we were in a not-so-active phase, after many zoom meetings over the pandemic. And I thought everything was getting better for Veronica's health, I really don't know where I find this misplaced optimism of mine.
On Sunday there was a memorial for her, and many people discovered many facets of Veronica's personality that we knew nothing about, like I learned that she did martial arts! The hiker, the pottery artist, the devoted wife and mother, the woman committed to improving society I knew well, but there were many other sides that I knew nothing about. I used to tease her quite a bit about being an engineer thru and thru and in the last weeks I had been planning to talk to her about persimmons. We have a persimmon tree and we don't like the fruit, which Veronica likes, so I always write to her to come and collect some, which she organizes carefully to make sure they finish ripening at the right time, in the right way. This year the fruit is ready to be picked up much earlier than usual, and I had been meaning to write her for a while saying it, when the horrible news arrived that she was in a coma. Some days later she was gone. I did not manage to say goodbye. So I'm saying it here: Rest in power, Veronica!
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