Right now, many hearts across Nashville and beyond are broken. Hearts are hurting because that was the kind of lasting, tender magic Joanna Stanfield Montgomery bestowed upon those around her when she was living. That heart-felt glow is no longer physically present, as Joanna died of cancer early Tuesday morning. When she was still living on this earth, Joanna glowed. There was something a bit magnifying about her presence. Not in a flashy way, but in a sweet, soft-spoken, tip-toe kinda way. With physical beauty, that stubbornly and exasperatingly, she didn’t believe she possessed, at least when I knew her. It was stunning beauty, but the kind that burrowed inward far beyond that her obviously gorgeous exterior. A beauty that reached out and lightly tapped others. Tag. You’re it. You’ve felt the attentive compassion of Joanna’s very presence. And if you were lucky, you heard or read her story.

Like her beauty, her words gripped the listener and the reader’s heart. She was always a late bloomer, she told us cast mates in that first reading of our soon-to-be onstage performance of Nashville’s inaugural Listen to Your Mother at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center (TPAC) last year. She came to true love, the romantic kind, late in life. And that love also made her a later-in-life mother. Three years ago, Joanna’s crazy, steadfast love with dashing and brash entrepreneur, Mark Montgomery, produced a red-headed baby beauty. At the birth of Magnolia Grace, Joanna learned via an emergency c-section that she, herself, had ovarian cancer. Please listen to her moving story here, but be sure to have a wad of tissues at the ready.

Our 2014 Listen to Your Mother Nashville performance filled the downstairs of TPAC, because this is a city that rallies and knows and loves good story, set to a tune or not. It was a bonding experience for us 13 women who made the cut from 80 others who auditioned. There was a group glow and a newness about that experience that took me, at least, a while to unpack. It was an experience in the impact of story. Of sticking your neck out and telling something that was hard to tell and doing it anyway because somebody else might just be feeling that way too. And while you told that story, it was healing you as the storyteller, but it also ended up helping heal others, too.

So, Joanna did that. Again and again. Over and over. Not just on that stage that one night with us, but other stages, and speaking events, and on her blog, and on Huffington Post. As cancer made it’s last rampage through her beautiful body, she wrote that she did heal some things on a not-so-physical level, while living her last days this spring and summer. And, her vulnerability all through that so difficult journey continued to help heal others, in various ways, too. And not just those also experiencing cancer. Not just those walking alongside loved ones on the life-mangling journey of cancer. But others who were made stronger by the bravery and the beauty that Joanna embodied in the face of something so mighty. Something so mighty it took her life.

But you know what? I believe in angels. Oh yes, I do. I have had one who’s been showing up in my life since I was eight years old. That’s an ongoing story about which I haven’t yet been able to figure out how to write. But given my journey with the angel who came to me a number of times in childhood, and then again a number of times in adulthood, starting with my daughter’s diagnosis of autism; and, given the experiences I have had since my two parents left this lifetime, I would bet my bottom dollar on something. That Joanna will not leave that little red-headed beauty alone without her mama. She’ll be there in another form. Always.

This year’s 2015 Listen to Your Mother Cast member and Tennessean writer Jessica Bliss writes about how Joanna also touched her life.