Stephanie Webb passed away in Madison on September 1, 2018,
after several years of ferociously battling kidney disease and its
complications. She was 48 years old, far too short a life for such a wonderful
woman.
Steph was smart, funny, sexy, tougher than nails, and
charming, but quick to anger at injustice. She made people laugh with her
comedic zine Crawfish, and in the 1990s she volunteered at WORT
Community Radio. She loved Game of Thrones (the books, not the TV show),
everything Jane Austen wrote, minor-league baseball in Beloit, old movies at
Cinematheque, the Wisconsin International Film Festival, bingo at Ho-Chunk or
Potawatomi, cooking delicious but low-budget meals, and marijuana strictly for
medicinal purposes.
She attended the University of Wisconsin in Madison, earned
her Bachelor's Degree in Chemistry and Russian Language Studies at the
University of Michigan, and her Master's in Library Science at San Jose State
University. She lived and worked in San Francisco (lovely but impossibly
expensive) and Kansas City (affordable but boring) before returning to Madison,
which she considered her home town despite being born in Racine.
She worked for Anchor Bank, in the Mortgage Department as
the real estate bubble popped, and later worked for the Wisconsin Department of
Safety and Professional Services, where she issued titles for mobile homes.
Stephanie always chuckled when she described that job, as if it was the
silliest sliver of state bureaucracy. But she enjoyed the work, helping mostly
old and poor people fill out forms to prove their mobile homes were theirs.
She is survived by her loving husband, Doug Cotton; her
proud parents, Jack and Karen Webb of Racine, Wisconsin; her extended family in
Iowa and Wisconsin; and an affectionate housecat, Minky, who's wondering where
Steph has gone. Special thanks to Stephanie's friends, her family, her dialysis
nurses Cynda and Annalise, Heather at the Vascular Department, and the staff at
UW Hospital that worked so hard to help her at the end, especially Danielle and
Jennifer, her nurses in the ICU.
Nothing would please Stephanie more than memorial donations
to Tony Evers' campaign for Governor of Wisconsin, to remove Scott Walker from
office.
The memorial service was private and has already been held,
but if you have any memories of Stephanie you’d like to share, please visit stephmemorial.com.
* * * * * * * * * *
Writing Stephanie's obituary was a surreal experience, and
no doubt I've botched it terribly. How do you sum up the life of someone you
loved more than anything, more than everything? It's a chore I never wanted to
do, but it had to be done — in our generation, an obituary is supposed to appear
in the local paper. It's expected, so there it is. Her death, though, is
something I hadn't expected at all.