Display MoreI have never wanted less to write something in this space. Yesterday, we lost a bright star in our universe. Lacey Reid (née Lacey Kumanchik) passed away after the fiercest fight with cancer anyone could ever conceive of. To rip off the bandage, as awkward as it seems: Lacey was the beloved wife of our founder Chris Reid and the mother of their three beautiful children. She was an engineer and an author and the kind of deep, bright soul. She is someone you do not know but who came into our lives in a way that was so important to (among many greater things) this space right here. We will plan to tell you more about her life in the future but I'm going to go ahead and try to tell you the briefest story of how I knew her in the hopes that you might think of her today as dearly as I have and always will. I hope that it's clear that in this incredible pain there is also infinite recompense from how incredible a person she was and how we were allowed, all too briefly, to have had her in our lives.
There has never been a more unlikely pair of friends than Chris Reid and me. We're a true Mutt and Jeff pair: I'm a big fat slob and Chris is short and fit and neat to a fault. Chris is a brilliant natural organizer and left to my own devices I'll cycle into endless thinky liberal arts nonsense and never get anything done. We live on opposite sides of the country and keep different schedules and there's every reason in the galaxy that we shouldn't be best friends. I met Chris in 1995 or so when we were each the respective obnoxious know-it-all of different parts of the nascent Wing Commander community: I ran the table at Origin's Official Wing Commander Chat Zone and Chris was the unquestioned master of alt.games.wing-commander on the Usenet. I remember we argued furiously about one of those true existential questions: when Wing Commander IV took place, 2672 or 2673 (Chris was right, for the record). By all rights we should've been enemies but instead we somehow came to realize that we completed each other in some special way. So we joined forces… and together (with the help of some amazing friends) we made one heck of a website and what I think is an enduring community!
I met Chris "IRL" in 1999 for what then seemed like the high point of our lives: the Austin SXSW premiere of the Wing Commander movie. We were both terrified high school kids who were seeing a world we'd dreamed about all our lives. And I should stress that meeting someone from the internet, especially in a strange city halfway across the country, wasn't something you did in 1999. But our moms bought us plane tickets and sent us on our way, presumably understanding what unthreatening dorky friends we already were. But it was wonderful and I, the most antisocial man in the world, left looking forward to the time someday in the future when I could see my friend again. And he must have felt the same way, because over the years we found reasons to get together despite the differences. We'd organize visits to conventions, archiving projects, movies that we both loved. And in that time we both grew up (more or less) and got jobs and lived our lives all the while continuing to work on the CIC (an update every day!).
In 2009, Chris and a bunch of our other old Wing Commander fans got together in Washington DC for something we were really excited about: the new Star Trek movie. We saw the first show in IMAX theater at the Air and Space Museum and we were all so happy to be together that we went out and saw it again at another theater afterwards. But it turned out Chris had somewhere else to be. I would later learn that he went home to Seattle and saw the movie again on a date! Which was exciting, we were awkward nerds! Neither of us were exactly ladies men. After that, he started to mention Lacey more and more. She was a fellow engineer at the (I'll leave it anonymous) airliner manufacturer Chris worked for. Men, especially men in their twenties, don't share so much about their personal lives directly, but you could just tell from how he'd want to mention her that this was a big deal. I remember using my elite internet skills to try to find out as much as I could about this woman who was threatening to take my buddy away! And what I learned was that she was pretty fascinating (she wrote romance novels and was GOOD at it) and obviously very smart. And as jealous as I might've subconsciously been, I was so happy to know that Chris was happy. And over the next few years we heard more and more about her whenever we'd meet up for some adventure or another. They got married in 2014 and we all flew up to Seattle to be part of it. And it was an incredible, incredible time. These two born organizers pulled off an event for the ages that was also so distinctly them and so distinctly human. It was held at the Museum of Flight and it was so wonderful to see how many people loved them. My antisocial streak continues to this day and I've absolutely never been to a wedding I didn't want to leave immediately… before or since, but that night in Seattle we danced under an SR-71 well into the night and I don't think anyone ever wanted it to end.
So as I said you didn't know Lacey Reid, but she was so important to why we are still here. Why we are more mature and smarter and better people than we had been. She made my friend, the man that made all of this website possible, so happy. She completed him in life the same way he did me in Wing Commander fandom. And I have so very many great memories of just that, whether it was Chris facetiming everyone the news after one of those Cloud Imperium Wing Commander anniversary livestreams that he came down for that they expecting or just seeing the slightest mention of here here in the news that she'd made a cake for the site's birthday or that they'd gone plane watching together. These felt like little cracks of humanity in my friend sneaking out into the world we'd made here and seeing them you just knew we were all better for it. And after they were married, we were blessed to get to know Lacey. She wasn't taking my friend away, she loved him and understood how important his world was. I'm so glad they got to come see us when we lived in California and everything seemed so happy. I'm so glad I got to know her. We became friends on social media and would tweet and later skeet back and forth. It was obvious that she was amazing. She lifted up Chris, she was clearly an incredible, thoughtful mom, she was endlessly socially conscious and she was just as smart and witty as I imagined snooping around about her when I first learned her name. And it was also pretty clear in our friendship she knew exactly how much I loved her husband and that she knew I would do my best to be there for her and that she appreciated that. (She also thought I was more famous than I actually am from all my Star Citizen nonsense, which seemed like such a kindness!) If there is a concept of a good soul, it was Lacey. If there isn't then she persisted in spite of that reality.
But that's another part of the story and it's an important one to remember here: Lacey fought cancer so hard. She found out very unexpectedly several years ago that she had what was very clearly terminal cancer. Doctors gave her very little time and she said hell no to that. She fought through countless surgeries and treatments and through so much pain and suffering. She lived to get to see her kids go to school and make happy memories with her and as almost impossible as it was to watch it happen it was also the brightest kind of shining humanity you can ever imagine. I could not have done it, I could not have come close. But she was so strong and she showed us what we would've thought was impossible. I'm privileged to have known her and seen such a good, good fight. She was so special in so many ways I'm not capable of expressing, that I'm forgetting and that I'm already mad at myself for forgetting to say in this space.
As much as this all hurts, I am so happy she found Chris, made him an even better person and that I got to know her. Most of her story isn't mine at all, but I will be endlessly grateful for what she, without a hint of selfishness, shared with me. I can't… artfully express how much hurt there is right now. How much anger that just I have that this beautiful family had to suffer for so long only to reach this inevitable end. How sad I am that the thing that felt like my friend's missing piece is gone. How furious I am that she can't be there for the kids she loved so dearly (I will note that they are lucky to have such a conscious and good father to help them through this nightmare). But I do know that all of these things hurt because they mattered in the first place. That we feel her loss because it is a true loss, and though we are worse for this tragedy having occurred we are better for having known her at all. And I'm happy that I got to let you know how I knew her.
My dear friend Chris, I love you and I am so sorry. My dear friend Lacey, I love you and I am so sorry.
