Dimmed Light & Lingering Laughter

I met Stacy Meadows when I went to volunteer at the old Coach House Theatre. It was early December 2017, and I had spent the previous year figuring out how to live alone after leaving my husband of 20 years. Community theater had been important to me in my youth — it was where I clung to childhood dreams of an acting career, of a romantic life lit by spotlights and infused with drama. Domesticity had dimmed those lights, so I thought returning to a theater could rekindle that spark within myself.

I saw her vacuuming the curtains around the entrance to the auditorium and thought she was a boy at first. Baggy jeans and layered T-shirts concealed her mounded chest and hips. Then we made eye contact and I fell.

Those jade-green eyes looked deep inside me, seemed to see me clearly without artifice or judgment for exactly what I was: a wounded soul with immense love to give.

I felt an immediate connection to this not-a-boy. An easy rapport surfaced between us, and we moved around each other easily in the small concession space of the theater, making coffee, setting out candy bars, counting the cash box.

Shortly before patrons were expected to arrive, Stacy put on her coat to go outside for a cigarette.

“Enjoy your cancer stick,” I said with a mischievous grin. It was the kind of taunt only an ex-smoker can feel entitled to hurl.

“Oh, I have cancer,’ she said, stopping and looking me dead in the eye. “But it’s brain cancer, not lung cancer. So I’m okay.”

Then she emitted that little laugh I would come to cherish more than the most expensive baubles on the planet. I can still hear it sometimes, like the ocean in a shell, like an echo of my own blood pulsing in my ear.

That first night at Coach House was so easy. We stepped around each other as if in a choreographed dance, lightly touching each other’s arm or hand or hip once in a while.

Our first date was less than a week later because I couldn’t wait until the next show to see her again. Our first kiss was in the parking lot of Giant Eagle. She smelled of cigarettes and a cologne trying to reinvent spring. Under it all was her scent, a light odor of sunshine and peace that reminded of me of my mother’s bare arm against my cheek as I napped in church a million years ago.

Some people we know before we know them.

We spent most of 2018 laughing, talking, drinking, smoking, arguing, crying, laughing some more, kissing a lot, singing off-key to the radio and learning each other’s topography. It was not a drama-free year. Our lives did not have a common rhythm, so there was conflict. After about eight months, I broke off our romantic relationship.

The funny thing is, we couldn’t seem to shake each other. I dated other people, but Stacy and I stayed in touch. We texted often, spoke on the phone once in a while. Between relationships, we’d go out for a drink or to shop together. Stacy and Bill and I were a well-balanced trio; we leaned against each other in equal and opposite proportions.

I always knew I could tell Stacy anything and not be judged for it. She had seen and felt the ugliest forms of inhumanity, had endured a kind of poverty I could only imagine, had risen again and again from the depths of pain and loss to embrace the light of life in a way I never thought possible. No matter what bad thing I had done or horrible thought I had entertained, Stacy accepted it — accepted me —as objectively valid and worthy of love. 

Her capacity to love without limits still floors me.

In the summer of 2020, in the midst of a pandemic that none of us understood, Stacy opened a whole new world of possibility to me. She suggested we try ballroom dancing lessons together.

I had wanted to learn ballroom dancing for decades. My ex-husband gave it a try long ago, but it was so far outside his comfort zone that it never stuck. No one else I dated was ever interested.

Stacy had learned to dance with men when she was a teenager, as a way of running interference for her mother who was a stunner in her day. Whenever Stacy and I were at a bar and a ballad came on, she’d take my hand, lead me to an open part of the floor and then lead me in a kind of slow two-step. I adored dancing with her, so I jumped at her invitation to a free first lesson at Riverfront Ballroom in Cuyahoga Falls.

That first lesson was fun, filled with our characteristic irreverent laughter and double-entendres. Our instructor was an insanely tall drink of water named Cain who seemed entirely unfazed by a couple comprised of two women. I was thrilled at the prospect of a) learning real dance steps and b) spending time with Stacy that didn’t involve drinking alcohol, so I bought a 10-lesson package for us and immediately began imagining how the next couple of months would go: We’d learn some cha-cha and rumba, become even more attuned to each other, develop an even deeper connection and rediscover how right we were for each other. I envisioned our relationship blossoming into a harmonious melody of romance.

It did not go that way.

For the first few lessons, I’d text Stacy what color dress I was going to wear — she always loved seeing me in a pretty dress — so she could match her shirt to it. Chemo had depleted her stamina, though, and the 40-minute lessons taxed her hard. By the sixth lesson, I was going alone. I was disappointed in her, but that dissipated quickly.

The thing about Stacy is that she was always and only exactly who she was, no more, no less. How can you stay angry at someone for being herself so completely?

One of the last times I saw Stacy, she was at Edwin Shaw Rehab Center last December after a stint in the hospital. Her tumor had grown back for the third time, and she was having difficulty making the left side of her body do as she wished.

We had such a good visit — Stacy was not only lucid but amazingly normal-seeming. She made jokes and macked on me like she always had. I left her after four hours with renewed optimism: She would get the physical therapy she needed, complete another round of chemotherapy and beat this dammed tumor once and for all.

Again, it did not go that way.

Seeing her curl into herself as the tumor ate away her life was brutal. It seemed so wrong to see this proud, powerful paragon of feminist force reduced to the silent softness that sickness requires.

Stacy had a resilience and resourcefulness that is rarer than any element on the planet. It seems life was trying to beat her down from the very beginning. And every single time it hit her, she found a way to get back up and defiantly say, “What else you got?”

But the really incredible thing about Stacy is that she never let those blows dim her light of hope. She remained kind, compassionate, empathetic and generous even as the world around her turned hateful, uncaring, cruel and stingy. She turned her cheek so many times it was raw and red, burned bald of hair and disfigured by glaring scars. But she always had room in her life for one more bracing hug, one more corny joke, one more encouraging comment, one more homeless dog.

I cannot yet imagine a world without Stacy Meadows in it. I don’t want to think about a universe without her unique light showing us how to be loving and kind in the face of harrowing despair. And I need her light more than ever, now that I won’t have another chance to hold her hand or sing along to the radio with her or dance with her on a sticky barroom floor.

Her sweet little chuckling laughter still rings in my ear, so I know her love still lives in my heart. My comfort now will be found in the face of every dog I meet on a walk — because the unconditional approbation of a wagging tail is the closest thing to Stacy’s pure love that any of us will ever have the privilege of knowing now that she’s gone.