I was, again, the new girl in school. 8th grade, middle school, the hardest years of a teenagers life. I don’t know how we met, but we did. It was probably because we had the same name, spelled the same way. Stacy without an E. You brought me into your friend group and we were it. Birthday parties in the basement, lunches with chocolate shakes and cherry filling, after school listening to music and talking about boys.
We watched the Challenger on tv’s on media carts, explode, the memory seared into my memory due to the tragedy of it all. You made my life tolerable. You made me feel seen.
I moved again, and again, and you stayed as a number in my rolodex saved for when I was back in a “calm” period of my life. It could be months between calls, or years, and it didn’t matter. We picked up where we left off, as if time had stopped during the lapse and everything was right in the world, because we were Stacy without an E.
I cried when the announcement happened that you had cancer. The C, with an E. The story of your life was already so tragic and this felt like overkill. Hospitals, chemo, blood marrow transplant. You were so weak right afterward, asking for your Squirt knowing that it wasn’t going to end well. The stay in the hotel room, with friends, signed up to be there to make sure you recovered and could come home. Trips to Omaha, long waits between appointments, chanting the mantra Fuck the C with an E.
And the days rolled on, and then it was my turn for the announcement of the C with an E. It wasn’t a bonding experience that either of us wanted to cement the 30+ year friendship, and here we are. We play Hand and Foot, and talk about grief and recovery, and feeling stuck and rejoicing in our children and laugh at the silly things that women our age shouldn’t find funny.
1985. The joining of the Stacy’s without an E. The crystal ball would have shown the future , our life lines intertwined and connected in happiness and tragedy. In silence and screaming. In laughter and in tears. And had we looked in the ball and asked “Do you want to continue?”, the answer would have still been yes. Because without you, there wouldn’t be the me that we all know.