It was late in 2020, and our friend Stacy was dead.

I just KNEW that the idea would have pleased her no end

Actress, comedian, musician, writer, jewelry maker and best friend to my wife; a beautiful dervish of energy and love and talent. She was courageous, kind and intelligent. If you were her friend, there were no limits to her generosity; a friend in need and it was Stacy to the rescue! She was proudly Jewish, but with no hint of the sense of superiority that can all too easily color the personality of anyone who is a strong believer in a faith, a Party, or almost anything. To Gina and her entire family, she was the fourth Berardesco sister.

A turbulent upbringing made her strong; the only thing that could defeat her was Multiple System Atrophy. In death she became a bit of a celebrity, as her self-penned Chicago Tribune obituary was read by a reporter, picked up by various news services, and wound up being seen all over the world: Chicago Tribune

It was only a few months after her funeral that I ran across a fundraising appeal by Britain’s Royal National Lifesaving Institution: “Launch a Memory”

The RNLI is England’s Coast Guard, but it is not a government entity. It is a charity, funded solely by donations from average people and rich patrons. To have an amateur Coast Guard strikes me as quintessentially British.

The appeal was to raise money to build more of a new class of offshore lifeboats that the RNLI was deploying, called the Shannon class. If you donated some minimum amount (not a lot, really, maybe 75 quid or so) they would place the name of a lost loved one on a boat. Each boat would bear the names of thousands of people who had had donations made in their honor.

It immediately struck me that there could be no more fitting memorial to our dear Stacy than this, for her name to be there when someone was saved from a watery grave. I just KNEW that the idea would have pleased her no end. So out came the plastic.

Boats take time to build, but Stacy’s lifeboat, RNLB 13-46, the “Duke of Edinburgh” entered service at Wells-next-the-Sea just two years and three days after her death: “Arrival”

Stacy’s name is located on the vertical bar of the letter R, just to the left of where the semicircular part rejoins. Like her love, her legacy lives on.