Exit, Left

There’s been a Marian-sized hole in my heart this week.

Those of you who read this paper regularly understand. Not long ago, the Longmont Theatre Company lost one of its stalwarts, Marian Bennett. On and offstage, she touched more lives than a workaholic chiropractor. She could communicate volumes about a character with one perfectly timed gleam in her eye and make you breathless with suspense or helpless with laughter.

I want to say she’s irreplaceable. She’d laugh at that and deflate the notion with her familiar Texas twang. And maybe she’d be right. All of us are … and none of us are. We all bring something unique that goes quiet when we leave. And barring a dramatic change in the history of the world, all of us are going to leave. Life is hazardous to your health, and the rest of us have to be ready to carry on when time brings another of us into the majority.

Easy to say. Hard to feel, to acknowledge, to own.

Especially when it’s someone close.

Doubly so when it’s someone who so undeniably lived.

 

Fill  to me the parting glass,

And drink a health whate’er befalls,

Then gently rise and softly call,

Goodnight and joy be to you all.

– The Parting Glass, traditional

 

The phrase “grande dame” can be easily misconstrued. It can suggest someone on a pedestal at best, a prima donna at the worst. But it literally means the great lady. Marian herself was charmed by the title until she looked it up in a dictionary and found that one of the definitions was “a highly respected elderly or middle-aged woman.”

“That (title) made me feel pretty good until I realized they were saying I was old,” she told me with one of her stage grimaces.

But Marian really did fill a room. Some of it was physical – she was a tall woman who naturally drew attention. A lot of it was that she did her best to reach out to everyone nearby. She wanted to talk, to chat, to hug – but you didn’t feel smothered. You kind of felt like your next-door neighbor had just come over to catch up.

On stage, that translated into the most perfect sense of timing I’ve seen in an actress. She could discard her dignity entirely to cross the stage in roller skates, or gather it around her to become King Lear himself, but she was always who she needed to be, where she needed to be.

Part of that was because backstage she worked like a fiend. (She and I often drilled lines on opening night, just to be absolutely sure.) Part of it was confidence, the same confidence that led her to travel, to speak her mind, to welcome a friend on one meeting. A lot of it may have been her willingness to look cockeyed at the world, and enjoy it when others did, too.

She could be nervous or anxious, like any actor. But I never saw her afraid. You can’t be if you go on stage. You have to be able to look inside yourself and then share it with the world.

Come to think of it, that’s true off stage, too. Life is more fun, more alive, if you can live it without fear. Not without common sense (Mar had plenty of that) but without drawing back from what you might find.

Even that makes her sound like a lesson. Granted, we all are to each other. But we’re all so much more, too. We’re friends and family and teachers and neighbors, connected by more than we can see.

And when that connection is broken, it hurts. For a long time. It never quite heals the same way … and it shouldn’t. You’ve loved them, cared for them, taken on some of their memories. Of course, they’re not going to vanish from your mind and soul like an overdue library book.

They’ve touched you – and you bear their fingerprints.

Goodbye, my friend. It was a pleasure to know you, an honor to work with you.

Take your bow with pride.

I’ll see you after the show.

Making Magic

Heather’s youngest sister hurried up to me as the rehearsal dinner wound to an end.

“Mom’s outside with Heather,” she said. “She’s sick.”

My turn to hustle. Sure enough, my wife Heather was doubled over on a bench outside the restaurant. It had been a warm night and heat is no friend to an MS patient; as she’d stepped outside the crowded dining room to get some air, she’d suddenly had to sit down before she fainted, threw up or both.

“I need the car,” she whispered as her stepmom watched over her. Of course. I hurried off and pulled around, slamming the air-conditioning from Spring Day to Christmas in the Arctic. Her family helped bundle her into the back seat, some asking if they needed to follow us home.

No need. After a few brief minutes in the frigid air, Heather was upright and coherent, talking easily and reassuring everyone. It was like magic.

Appropriate enough. After all, dealing with any chronic condition is something akin to stage magic.

We’ve dealt with a lot of things for a lot of years. Crohn’s disease. Ankylosing spondylitis. Now multiple sclerosis. Each time, we’ve had to meet it with the dedication and training of a David Copperfield, not to vanish the Statue of Liberty, but to make something close to a real life reappear.

It can be done. But like a Copperfield or a Houdini, it takes hours of advance preparation to make things seem natural, even effortless to an audience. The wedding of Heather’s sister Jaimee the next day was typical, where a full morning’s rest, a constantly-present water bottle and periodic micro-breaks outside the reception helped Heather survive a ceremony on the hottest day of the year.

Magic indeed. But you never really get to let the curtain go down.

Chronic illness ebbs and flows, but the need to manage it never really goes away, much like the need to exercise. It’s a constant. For someone who hates losing control of their life, it can even be something of an irony – now you have to take control of your life whether you want to or not, even those things that would normally be automatic for most people.

You measure how much you can do before the fatigue catches up. You inventory what you need for even a short excursion. You balance, compromise, postpone so that the essentials can keep going. Maybe you even learn for the first time what the essentials truly are.

Somehow, you keep things going. Sometimes surprisingly well. Well enough that friends or relatives can be astonished when a breakdown occurs, because they’ve never seen you that sick.

It’s a triumph. But it’s a tiring one. After all, the show must go on … and on, and on, and on.

I’m not saying any of this to fish for pity. If anything, what I feel is closer to wonder. I am married to a strong person in a compromised body, and even on the days when she’s feeling weakest, the power of what she’s already done shouts to me in a voice I can’t ignore.

This is more than magical. This is miraculous. Maybe not the kind of miracle where a lame man is suddenly pole-vaulting down the street, but miraculous nonetheless.

There will be better days. There always are, eventually. But until that intermission hits, the Magically Medical Rochat Family will continue the conjuration. We can’t let the audience down, after all.

And if it means some long highway trips in sub-frigid air, then so be it.

After all, I already knew she was the coolest lady around.