I'm slowly running out of folks who really knew my Mom, and Abby was at one time a client (one of my early projects at the P.R. firm was to get Abby's "Machine Cuisine" columns syndicated ... I guess I did a good job, as she had a 20+ year run of widespread pick-up), and was a long-time friend.
I wonder if, moving on into the future, there is going to be this big abyss in the communal memory, dropping off like the edge of the continental shelf, right around 1994 (when the WWW was just starting to get traction). I know that I have a hard time coming up with meaningful web research for "general stuff" that pre-dates 1995, while nearly everything since then is retreivable somehow.
Without solid records or extant memories the past seems so abstract.
(sigh)
I've always wanted to leave behind the equivalent of a "Presidential Library", but it doesn't look like I'm ever going to have grad students signing up to do the sorting and filing. I guess I need to start wrapping my mind around the concept of "just fading away".
:-(