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Dannell Lites:
Online friends mourn the loss of woman who died alone
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by Lee Hill Kavanaugh,
The Kansas City Star
Dec. 22, 2002
Her body arrived at the Jackson County medical examiner's office in the afternoon. Death came swiftly on Sept. 16, the medical chart said, from complications of diabetes and a poor heart.
Dannell Lites was 49. She lived alone and died alone. No obituary was written for her.
After she died, no one claimed her body. No relatives. No friends.
Even so, hundreds of people loved her -- most in cyberspace.
There, Lites was a talented writer in the genre she loved: comic book superheroes. She wrote of love and human struggles, grief and loneliness.
She ran three websites about Batman, Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes, researching how the characters changed over the decades, fleshing out their three-dimensional selves.
She was unemployed, except for the occasional job at a comic book store, where she asked to be paid in comic books. Her bad heart made walking and bathing difficult. She often ignored her diabetes until she felt dizzy. She hated taking medicine.
She was 4 feet 9 inches tall and weighed 153 pounds, with a round face, soft body and bad teeth. Her eyes were brown, her hair long, thin and black, with streaks of gray. She was probably of American Indian descent, a doctor wrote on her chart.
The medical examiner's office tried in vain to find anyone who knew her, anyone who might want to give her a burial, a service. A brief article was placed in The Kansas City Star.
No one came forward.
After a time, the body was buried in a pauper's grave at Taylor's Cemetery in Elmira, Mo. A caretaker from Watkins Bros. Memorial Chapel said a prayer as her body was laid to rest, something they always do for those who have no one.
She left few material things: a collection of Star Trek movies, a stack of dog-eared comic books and a computer. How strange that someone so poor had a computer, thought Jeff Ragsdale, the manager at Dunbar Gardens apartment complex, where she lived.
"She was very nice, but she seemed very needy," Ragsdale said.
"It wasn't a bad heart that killed her," said Rick Phillips, who lived three doors away. "It was a broken one. She was as lonely as they come."
In Huntington, W.Va., Rivka Jacobs typed out yet another message for her friend:Where are you? Please answer my e-mails. I'm getting worried.
Logging in several times a day, Jacobs had not heard from her e-mail buddy in weeks. Then came the message from another website: Lites was dead.
"The whole list exploded with the news," said Jacobs, a member of several comic book Web sites.
In cyberspace, Lites had found her niche. Online she was smart, funny, caring. She encouraged would-be writers to try their storytelling.
Lites was prolific, writing 250 stories, including several that won awards from comic book fan fiction groups. She wrote in the comic book fan fiction genre, in which the author takes a comic book character and expands on that character's story. Sometimes her stories had adult themes.
She posted questions, answers and advice with a Cajun drawl, replacing "I" with "Ah" and "me" with "moi." She often ended a posting with the words: "Smoochies sugah."
But in real life, Lites had no Southern drawl.
Her death and the emerging details of her life stunned her friends.
"Dannell was very proud and never told us anything about her hardships," said Lou "DarkMark" Mougin, from Abilene, Texas. Mougin co-wrote several stories with Lites over the years.
"We rarely talked IRL -- that's cyber shorthand for `in real life,' " he said.
Jacobs said: "The Internet is revolutionary for women like Dannell and me. But she didn't reveal a whole lot of stuff about herself. And I didn't ask, because I didn't want to pry."
Perhaps the lack of prying has changed her friends, Mougin said.
"Although we talk all the time on our computers, we still don't know each other really," he said. "Yes, her computer was her window on the world, but it also points out the blinders with an online relationship. You don't really know about a person until you can access them in the flesh."
Since her death, Lites' friends have taken stock of their lives and thought about the reality of death. Some organized their wills. Some bought burial plots. But the biggest change of all is that because of Lites they have decided to talk "in real life."
"We're calling up and asking each other, 'How are you doing? Are you OK?' " Jacobs said. "If anyone is sick or anything else is wrong, we want to know. We really do care."
It haunts her still, she says, that maybe Lites did not know how well-loved she was.
In life, she lived anonymously. But after her death, Lites' friends want her to be more than just a number in a paupers field.
To date, at least $500 has been donated to buy and install a headstone for her.
"They wanted it to be made of rose granite, with a little chiseled picture of a woman with an umbrella, sort of like a Southern lady," said Luise.
The icon was on Lites' Web sites.
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The epitaph on the simple 17- by 10-inch marker was carefully penned. It will read: Beloved Fanfic Femme.
A decade ago Lites was an active member of the Kansas City Science Fiction and Fantasy Society, but she stopped going to meetings a few years ago. Then she stopped returning phone calls. Finally, she moved away from a midtown apartment without leaving a forwarding address. Just last year the group tried in vain to find her to invite her to a holiday party.
Only now are her Kansas City friends hearing about her death.
Lawless Morgan, owner of Lawless Times Comics & Magazines, 3117 Troost Ave., said he had never met anyone with her depth of knowledge on comic books.
"We'd talk for hours at the store," he said. "We were comic book geeks together."
But with all their conversations, she never once told him about her fan fiction stories on the Internet.
"Her stories are incredible. I'm stunned," he said after reading a few.
Another Kansas City friend also was heartbroken hearing about her death.
"Danni was so sweet," said Ben Thomas, whose family shared a house with Lites several years ago. "We nicknamed her R2D2, and she loved it ... But for some reason she stopped calling me and several other of her friends. I'd hear from her once a year, and then not at all. We tried to find her."
Thomas paused to cry.
"You know, friendships can drift, but that doesn't mean you stop caring for someone. This is so sad, that she died so alone.
"She didn't have to."
Published by
The Kansas City Star
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