Cancer has already stolen a disturbing number of friends and family members over the past dozen years: my fellow tech columnist Steve Wildstrom, my gifted Washington Post colleague Bill Walsh, my digital-journalist pal Mandy Jenkins, and my father-in-law Al Wales, to name the first who come to mind. Last week, this cruel monster of a disease took somebody particularly close to me: our family’s beloved Irish cousin Catherine Brodigan. She was 45. Her daughters are 8 and 13. I first met Catherine not through some family reunion on the other side of the Atlantic but, of course, via e-mail. She sent me a message in November of 1998 introducing herself after spending time with my mom and two of my U.S. cousins when they had visited Ireland, which apparently led to them telling Catherine she had a fellow early adopter of tech on this side of the pond. Catherine started her own blog back in 2006; two years later, she had made enough connections with fellow Irish bloggers to put together a book sharing their stories and photographs on the theme of “home.” She was ahead of me on more than one social platform, for years using the handle “backpedalbrakes” as a nod to her enjoyment of getting around by bicycle. And she became a talented photographer, as you can see from her Instagram. My cousin was also deeply devoted to making Ireland a more tolerant and free country. She went out and campaigned for a “yes” vote in the 2015 referendum to legalize same-sex marriage that made my other country the first in in the world to enact marriage equality via a popular vote. Then she did the same three years later for a referendum to repeal a constitutional ban on abortion that operated as a particularly harsh forced-birth regime; the repeal passed by a two-thirds majority. Catherine went on to work at a series of tech companies, notably Twitter for a year and change in its non-evil phase and then the customer-service firm Intercom. I would have thought that meant we’d run into each other at conferences all the time, but that only happened once: Web Summit’s Collision conference in Toronto in May of 2019. But she visited the States often enough on her own–more than almost all of our Irish relatives, helping to knit our extended transatlantic family a little closer. On my own trips to my grandmother’s native country, Catherine was the first person I’d look up; I stayed with her and her family when I covered Web Summit’s 2015 conference in Dublin, the last there before it moved to Lisbon. After returning to her city to speak at Dublin Tech Summit in 2022 (the photo above of the two of us dates to then) and then spend a few days there with my own family in 2023, I was looking forward to the next such time. But at the end of December, Catherine posted a note to Instagram saying she’d been diagnosed with lung cancer, expressing some confusion over her not having the usual risk factors while voicing optimism about her treatment. Her last post there in July shared the news that the cancer had spread to her brain. One of many things I dislike about Meta is how its vapid algorithm didn’t show me this post until a few days later. And that’s why my next trip to Ireland happened on much shorter notice. I flew to Dublin Sunday night, two days after my brother had made the same trip and only seven hours and change after returning from Florida to see a space launch with my family, just so I could spend a little time grieving with hers. Spending barely 48 hours over there didn’t do my sleep cycles any favors, but being with family was worth that and more. Like Loading... ### _Related_

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Freelance tech journalist