Phil

I have mixed feelings about having met Ada. Nothing against Ada – I enjoyed every conversation I had with her. But I feel like, had she never gotten sick, I never would have met her. She came shortly after she was diagnosed to a support group for people with disabilities. She cried as she said she was becoming paralyzed, the only time I ever saw her cry.
 
I’m sure she had more difficult times in the years after she learned what was happening to her, but I never saw them. She seemed more concerned with getting on with things, even as the things she was getting on with changed, than she was in the sadness that she must have felt for her worsening health.
 
I started seeing her around the Google campus from time to time, and eventually we started talking about her joining the accessibility engineering team. She became a coworker, and then a friend.
 
I’m not sure what led us to be friends. Part of it was probably our shared interests in the problems faced by people with disabilities and our willingness to try just about anything to see if it would work (she for herself, I for my son who uses a wheelchair and has difficulty processing what he sees). As I learned more about her, though, I came to understand what a remarkable person Ada was, though. She told me amusing stories of dealing with hackers attacking YouTube, and once casually mentioned that she had been building an airplane. I love to tinker with projects myself, but I marvel at someone who would take on something as complex as building their own airplane in their spare time. So I like to think we could have been friends under other circumstances as well, although I would’m not sure I’d have held her interest.
 
Ada also wasn’t self-conscious. She didn’t mind me taking pictures or video of the creative solutions she found to remain a productive engineer as her control of her body slipped away. I used her as an example in a couple of talks about people with motor impairments.
 
I recall her commenting that she’d never really thought about one distinction I drew between her and my son. She came to her disability with a large set of well-honed skills, and thus needed to focus “only” on finding clever solutions to keep working. My son, in contrast, needs to learn both how to use the technology and the skills needed to do something with it. I struggled with how to explain that point, feeling like it was something useful to say but also something that Ada might take offense at. But instead she seemed genuinely to appreciate the extra perspective.
 
She wasn’t shy about criticism, though. One of the last times I spoke with her she mentioned a novel I’ve been trying to write about an engineer with disabilities similar to my son’s. She’d given me a lot of praise for the first couple of sections, but frankly told me that the last one wasn’t as good. Ada had a low tolerance for bullshit, another thing I liked about her.
 
I can’t help but wonder what she’d think of this little write up. I’m not particularly happy with it. I clearly lack the literary skill to distill my memories of my friend Ada into an impersonal document without it feeling like a pale shadow of the wonderful person she was. I wonder what she would say about it. Probably something short, funny, and helpful. Maybe she’d suggest that the ending needs work.