It sounds a bit silly when I write it down: My work-study boss died two-and-a-half years ago, and I’m still sad about it.
A bit… much, right? I graduated from college nearly 15 years ago. She was just a nice lady who worked for my university who mostly let me dick around on the computer and sometimes had me help out with cool events her department was putting on.
But of course she wasn’t just a nice lady. Her name was Stacy Oliver, and she was perhaps the most positive influence on my young adult life, a radiant being whose radical kindness shaped the kind of person I decided to become once I was done being a twentysomething shithead.
It wasn’t just me—plenty of other people passed through Stacy’s hands and were changed for the better. Her obituary is a laundry list of good deeds.
Stacy died in October 2020, after dealing for years with one of the most terrifying neurodegenerative conditions I’ve seen. What made it so terrifying was that I knew Stacy before her condition manifested, back when she would sing my name, fold me into her comfortable arms; back when she would belly-dance and whirl around a room. I saw, through the years, what was taken from her—voice, movement—and I grieved their absence all the more bitterly as absolute fuckstains rose to power while she lost hers. It was all simply too cruel to countenance, that Stacy should suffer and agents of hatred should prosper. Perhaps that is why her loss is the one that has stuck with me so profoundly over the years, and why, despite having lost relatives, coworkers, even a friend or two, it’s Stacy who will take up residence in my heart during major life events, her spirit cheering me on.
You’d think I’d have abandoned Facebook by now. It’s a reprehensible company and more or less a social graveyard. But it’s still the best way to communicate news to casual acquaintances, and so I remain, only occasionally posting, almost never lingering for more than a minute or two to check notifications.
A strange thing started happening a few months ago: I would have a notification to check out a memory, some activity that had happened on Facebook five, 10, 15 years ago. And more often than not, that activity is from Stacy. Giving me encouragement, telling me I was beautiful, talented, deserving. She read a novel I wrote and deemed it “AMAAAAAAZING,” read and liked every article I linked to, loved every photo.
At first, I was appalled: Doesn’t Facebook know she’s dead? How ghoulish to resurface these memories, to remind me of my grief.
Now, I hunger for those notifications. I check more frequently than I’ll admit in public, hoping I’ll get to experience her warmth again on any given day.
There are so many things I wish I would have shared with her. I wish she could have seen me get married, a mere six months after her passing—having seen the messy end of my college relationship first-hand, I know she would have been tickled that I ended up marrying a guy with the same first name. She probably would have joked about how the college guy was just “the wrong Steve” for me. I wish I could have texted Stacy when I got into the Warner Bros. TV Writers’ Workshop, or when I won the Hollywood, Health & Society Blue Sky Scriptwriting Contest. When we decided to leave LA, when we decided to move back to New York, a place she loved and the last place I saw her alive.
I don’t know how many of these memories Mark Zuckerberg’s Skinner Box has for me. There’s probably some way to check, to just look at all of Stacy’s missives to me all at once. Instead I’ll wait, and hope for repeats, year after year, clinging to this stupid bullshit website, the machine that has preserved Stacy’s words, the only way for the dead to speak.