It’s just past midnight, and my friend Debs beckons me to come into her lamp-lit hotel room and sit down on the bed. She’s telling two of our fellow balloon artists about a wacky new design she saw.

“He made these reindeer blasters,” she says. “Oh, we were dying!”

We freeze. And then Debs says, “Well, me literally.”

The silence breaks, and we laugh and laugh and laugh.

Deborah Fellman, balloon artist extraordinaire, is 54 and dying. And she’s ending her life the way she spent so much of it — creating smiles.

Recently, she gave a gift of joy to the city of Richmond: a wonderland of blossoming tulips and hyacinths and daffodils, of birds and frogs and butterflies, of cascading water and tumbling clouds and soaring glass … all made entirely out of balloons.

Twenty thousand balloons’ worth of awe and delight, a gift from Debs to the city she loves. And a gift from all of us to Debs.

Fifty balloon twisters came to Richmond this weekend to honor Debs, flocking from near and far to participate in creating Debs’s final installation. We’re a tight knit community, balloon artists — these off-kilter people who don’t just twist dogs and swords but massive sculptures of breathtaking complexity in a medium that’s destined to pop in a matter of days. All of us met Debs at previous balloon builds and conventions and jams around the country. And when we heard about her final build, we all knew that we couldn’t miss it.

Debs got sick suddenly. One day in November, she was a community fixture, a doting aunt, a savvy proprietor of a growing business. The next, a physician was telling her that she might not live until Christmas...READ MORE