Some people walk into your life at the exact moment you need them, and you never forget the first time you saw them. For me, Cindy was perched on top of a giant wooden rocking horse, waving and smiling, and I was in one of the darkest stretches I have ever lived through. My wife Claudia had just died after a nine-year illness. Cindy did not know me, but she saw me, and in her own way she helped pull me back toward the living. This isn’t a formal obituary. It’s a thank-you to a friend I lost too soon.
How We Met
I met her at the Renaissance faire, the way I met most of the people who came to matter to me out there. There were two enormous rocking horses, the largest in the world, built for two riders and impossible to tip over, and at first I ignored them. Rocking horses are for kids, I figured. Then Cindy showed me otherwise. You climb on with a friend, or you ask a stranger passing by, and you rock together and talk. That was the whole thing. It sounds small. It wasn’t.
She was the lovely lady up on the horse, friendly and easy to talk to, always happy to wave you over. I rode behind her at the Irwindale faire in 2006, and I have the photos to prove it. She had a way of making a person feel welcome that you can’t teach.
Who She Was
Cindy was Les Hartness’s partner, Les being the man behind the horses, the Rocking Horse Guy who carved Vlad and Freya by hand and was working on a third he called Trey. She lived that whole life on the road with him, faire to faire, the horses riding in the living room of their trailer between shows. But she was far more than someone standing next to a remarkable man.
She was a native of Santa Cruz. She had raised a special-needs son on her own for sixteen years, single and sober through all of it, and she said it with a laugh rather than a complaint. She was a painter who came to it almost by accident. She built and painted stage sets, props, and costumes for teen musical theater. She was a licensed cosmetologist who did hair, makeup, prosthetics, and special effects. She had done woodworking, construction management, and computer work. The faire was her first real step back out into the world after years immersed in raising her son, and she used to say she walked in wearing a deer-in-the-headlights look. Whatever fear she came in with, she turned it into one of the warmest presences on the field.
Her Humor
What I remember most is how funny she was. I once asked her, half joking and half serious, where a gentleman is supposed to put his hands when riding behind a lady on one of those horses. The men had told me “if she doesn’t slap you, you didn’t put them in the right spot,” which didn’t sit right with me. Cindy gave me a real answer, wrapped in jokes: reach forward and hold the horse’s mane, it’s attached well for exactly that, and if you come away with a loose strand, keep it and proudly announce you found yourself “a piece of tail” last eve. Then she added the line I can still hear: “Honey, you should know better than to ask the men anything. Ask me. I’ll always give you a straight answer.”
That was Cindy. She rode Vlad standing up, all 103 pounds of her on twelve hundred pounds of horse, purely because Les once told her she couldn’t. “Your ass isn’t big enough, honey,” he said, and she said, “Watch me.” And she did.
What She Gave Me
I was grieving when I met her. Claudia had been sick for nine years and then she was gone, and I was hollowed out. Cindy seemed to understand what I was carrying without my having to explain it. She didn’t fix it, nobody could have, but she made room for me at a time when I badly needed someone to. She helped pull me out of one of the worst times of my life, and she did it the way she did everything, with warmth and a joke and an open invitation to climb on the horse and rock for a while.
She told me, more than once, that I would always be welcome to ride with her. Any time, any place.
Losing Her
Lester, the Rocking Horse Guy, posted this the evening she died:
It’s Sunday evening, and I have bad news. Cindy took her own life this afternoon. I am still in shock, and I don’t think it has really set in yet. I loved her with all my heart, everybody did. She was a wonderful woman. She had lots of friends, and I am in no condition to call and talk to everyone. I held her in my arms until the paramedics took her away, and it was the most painful thing I have ever gone through. When I find out any information about a funeral, I will post it here. Please, everybody send her your best wishes, she loved you all.
Cindy took her own life on a Sunday afternoon in the early 2000s. I held her until the paramedics came, and it remains the most painful thing I have ever been through. I don’t understand what was happening in her world that brought her to that point. I’m not sure anyone fully did. She had so many friends, and she was loved by all of them, and that is the cruel thing about this kind of loss: it can take someone who seemed, from the outside, to be the warmth holding everyone else together.
I won’t pretend to make sense of it here. I’ll just say that the woman I knew was kind, funny, generous, and alive in a way that made the people around her feel more alive too. That is how I choose to hold her.
, Lester, the Rocking Horse Guy
Remembering Cindy
I still picture her up on that horse, waving, grinning, calling someone over for a ride. That image has outlasted the grief. She turned a child’s toy into a small machine for joy and connection, and she handed that joy to anyone who walked by, including a heartbroken man who didn’t know he needed it.
I never knew her last name. I knew her heart, and that turned out to be the part worth keeping.
Rest well, Cindy. Thank you for the ride.
Share Your Cindy Story
If you knew Cindy, rode one of the rocking horses with her, or crossed paths with her at a faire, I’d like to hear about it. Leave a comment below or reach out to me directly. Share a memory, something she said, or what she meant to you. She gave a lot of people a moment they never forgot, and her story keeps going in the people she touched.
If you are struggling or thinking about suicide, you are not alone and help is available. In the US, you can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, any time, day or night.