I was pregnant with my son when Roger Ebert died. A friend of mine called me, and she could tell from my voice that I did not yet know. So she told me, gently and quietly, and I wept. It’s one of two times in my life when I’m extremely grateful to have already had therapy scheduled for that day, because someone I loved but arguably did not really know had died. In this case, I had not even met him once, the way I had with Sir Terry Pratchett. On the other hand, we had exchanged a few e-mails, so he is the first person I’ve covered for this column that I’ve interacted with.

In Life Itself, Roger tells us about how his mother had to explain to her friends exactly what it did for a living. In the same book, he talked about how Urbana was starting to put up plaques on the buildings where significant residents had lived, and he felt like a cheat having one on his. I e-mailed him and sternly told him that no mother would ever have to explain film criticism to her friends again, because we all had him as an example. There had been film critics before Roger, of course; somewhere around here, I have a book of film criticism by Carl Sandburg from the ’20s. But with Roger, film criticism became mainstream.

Of course, he was a screenwriter. I’m not sure we’d be talking about Beyond the Valley of the Dolls as much as we do if anyone other than Roger had written it, but there it is; Roger wrote it, and we’re talking about it. I’m not sure he himself took it all that seriously in later years, but still. Enough so that I have a Criterion edition with his commentary track, admittedly not recorded for Criterion—by the time they released it, he was dead. But even though I think the argument that you shouldn’t criticize film if you haven’t done it yourself is nonsense, if it were valid, Roger definitely would still qualify.

Further, I used to call him our greatest living film historian. Obviously, I can’t compare him to every film historian, but I might just remove the qualifier and declare that he was the greatest film historian. He didn’t do enough commentary tracks; I was part of a group trying to convince him to do them Pop-Up Video style, after he’d lost his voice. Because the information he was giving us was so fascinating, and his writing was so distinctly his voice anyway. I don’t hear voices in my head when I read, but I did with Roger. To this day, when I read his writing, he is talking to me in my head, telling me the things he finds interesting about movies.

Also, for the most part, he was a hell of a nice guy. Oh, not perfect. Roger Ebert was not a saint. He had his blind spots; I really would like to have been able to talk to him about his acceptance of the vicious misogyny of ’70s film, for one. I’ve seen several of his articles that I cannot defend because of attitudes he held about one thing or another; there was a discussion in the Facebook group this week about his attitudes toward suicide, which were probably informed by his being an old man who was raised Catholic. That’ll happen.

Roger read every comment on his blog. Every last one. And commented on many. And really cared about the people who commented. I mentioned once, in response to a blog entry, my belief that I’d saved someone’s life by being open about my illness and telling them to get help for their suicidal ideation—telling them, in fact, not to even bother turning off their computer and just walk away and get help. The person ended up hospitalized for two weeks, and I’m grateful to the hospital staff for letting him message me and tell me he was okay. And after I told that story, Roger e-mailed me and asked if it was someone who commented on his blog, because he’d become very worried about the person’s mental health and hadn’t heard from him in a while. He hoped I could tell him that the person was okay.

We live in an age when we are closer than ever to our heroes. Sometimes, that doesn’t go at all well for us, and we learn terrible things about them. Sometimes, we discover that the person really is as nice as we’ve been led to believe. Roger really was that nice. I’ve never heard a bad story from someone who knew him personally. I miss him horribly.

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