The young Vancouver blogger who went by the handle 65_RedRoses was, in many respects, a classic web girl.
She had a penchant for pretty self-portraits, a keen sense of mischief, a strong social circle online, and an unstoppable need to share her thoughts with the world.
But Eva Dien Brine Markvoort was no ordinary blogger: among the many profound thoughts she shared on her blog was the admission, via YouTube video, that she was dying.
She died a month ago, at 25, of complications arising from cystic fibrosis.
65_RedRoses took her online name from the disease that killed her. Like many children afflicted with cystic fibrosis, little Eva couldn’t pronounce the name of her condition, calling it “sixy-five roses” instead.
As a young woman living in hospital with CF, subject of a documentary about her struggle, Eva added the word “red” with its dash of bravery and panache and began sharing her experience via the 65_RedRoses blog.
Justin Cousineau, the editor of that 64_RedRoses documentary, became Eva’s boyfriend; but he was falling in love with her before they met. It was an understandable reaction. He’d seen the footage. Her beauty, originality and honesty shone on tape – even as she dealt with the horrors of her health and her hospital life – just as they do online.
Like many, if not most of her admirers, I’ve only known 65_RedRoses through her work. I only learned of her journal weeks after she’d died, thanks to an article on CNN.com titled Death at 25: Blogging the end of a life. But I’m mourning her just the same.
It’s not just that she died young, or that she was brave, or that she inspired, as she lived with constant complications, and dealt publicly with life as a lung transplant recipient. It’s not even that she continues to inspire in death, encouraging others by her own work, advocating for organ donation from beyond the grave. It’s also that we’ve lost a blogger of the highest order.
It’s an oddity of the online world that this medium, that should be so divisive, can be so incredibly intimate. Eva, as 65_RedRoses knew that instinctively. She also grasped the fact that love, desire, family, beauty, and death – the makings of great drama – are found in our private lives; to make these things accessible to the public without stripping them of their tension is the act of an artist.
Featured photos of Eva with smooching with her boyfriend, clowning with her close friends and spending fond time with her family have that quality of un-self-consciousness unique to a generation intimate with technology. But her laptop images of herself, in which she is every inch the fashion diva, albeit with plastic tubes running into her nostrils, represent a layered, poignant self-portraiture worthy of display in any contemporary gallery.
Her blog is more than a journal; it is a work of art, and a legacy.
Her memorial, fittingly titled Celebration of Love, was streamed online: private, personal, public, and poignant all at once.
That’s the 65_RedRoses standard. There is none better.