Cindy was a friend. She was a daughter, a wife, and a sister, but most
importantly, she was a friend. She was a friend who would stay up 'til late hours
to do your taxes, run to the post office and mail them for you so you wouldn't
miss the deadline. She was a friend who would pay for your cab ride home after
a night out, a friend who would at moments notice put her needs aside and take
care of yours. This is why you'll hear more than one person call her "their best
friend." She talked, walked, typed and thought fast. She fed her craving for the
world of ideas through her love of anything scientific or involving math,
especially her quest to find a pattern to the prime numbers. She would do her
figuring on the train, at her desk, in her head, on napkins, post-it notes, pads,
bills, and receipts. She saw these numbers like none of us could. They were
real to her: breathing and pulsating with truths about our universe and our
existence only few could fathom. Cin was a Trekkie. I was to tape the new
series of Star Trek and Buffy, The Vampire Slayer, this upcoming season since
she refused to watch TV. "I've been most productive in my life when I didn't
have TV," she just told us the Saturday before the attack. No TV?? I didn't
understand her. She wasn't a girly girl. She didn't care about the latest fashion,
expensive make-up, new fads, shoes or hairstyles. Cosmopolitan, Vogue and
Glamour held no interest for her. She loved the movie Contact with Jodie Foster
and wanted to be her character in the movie. Space travel was one of her
biggest dreams. She lived in more than three dimensions and could talk about
them as if they were every day occurrences. You didn't need the Internet when
you had Cindy. She was a living encyclopedia full of facts and statistics. Cindy
was the person to call with the most obscure of questions. I was jealous of her
and swore I would start to read New York Times religiously, but Cin didn't need
to read the New York Times, she simply absorbed the information around her
and retained it. Her love for history as well as good mystery led her into the
fascinanting yet often frustrating world of genealogy. Her partner in crime
became her brother Rich. They spent countless hours at the New York Public
Library, the National Archives, ancestry sites and census records trying to
unravel their family history. It was her daily obsession and passion as much as
her many pets whose language she understood. She was a mommy to two dogs,
two cats, and many fishes as she would call them. Cindy loved New York
because she was New York, a city filled with life full of extremes, energy, and
never-ending dreams. She loved its scents, foods, possibilities. She would say
that she was just a tiny grain in the sand of humanity and yet she was a rock for
so many of us. There are many things she wasn't and yet she was everything to
us. She was my friend and if you had the fortune to have met her, she would
have been yours too.
Kori Zunic
