Article content continued

Kathleen Smith, a popular Edmonton blogger and prolific Twitter user with 14,500 followers, opines on everything from same-sex marriage (she supports it), to the waiters at Montana’s Cookhouse (they all look like “Woody from Toy Story”), to the messy brew that is Alberta politics (she skews part liberal/part libertarian/part pragmatist, depending on the day).

On Christmas Day, she was merrily tweeting about drinking “mimosas on the patio in beer glasses … at Grandpa’s house.”

The next day, “the idiocracy” of the Seth Rogen/James Franco school of filmmaking raised her ire before, alas, the mother of four succumbed to a cold on Dec. 27, like she always does on vacation, because life for Ms. Smith, a.k.a. @KikkiPlanet, generally involves a healthy dollop of “DRAMA.”

Then came this tweet Dec. 3o: “Today I lost my youngest son, my beautiful boy. Our hearts are broken. We thank all of you for your kind messages.”

Mackenzie (Mack) Thomas Pawluk was a “styling dude,” his mother says from Edmonton in a voice that croaks with grief. She tells me he always wore a hat; not baseball caps — unless he was at work digging drains — but trilbys and newsboy caps.

He was funny, a real laugh-a-minute kid with a wide circle of friends and a series of epic pranks to his credit, including staging a mock pirate battle on the pirate ship at the West Edmonton Mall. (He got banned from the mall for that one).

Two days before Christmas, he talked with his Mom about moving out of his Dad’s place — Ms. Smith and his father, Darren Pawluk, divorced when he was two, both remarried but remain close. He even fished a box full of old dishes out of her basement for this soon-to-be-rented new pad.