To Carry Her Spark
“The power of reason/ And the flowers of deep feeling/ Seem to serve me/ only to deceive me.” “Song for Sharon,” Joni Mitchell
1.
Just over two weeks ago, I lost a dear friend, artistic collaborator, and contemporary.
Her sudden hospitalization a week prior to her passing was utterly unexpected—our mutual dear friend texted me around ten PM on a Thursday about three weeks ago and wrote, “Can I talk to you about something bad that has happened?”
She was able to fly out that next day to be with her, and I unfortunately was not, but she was able to read a poem I had written that next day to our friend in the ICU. My friend said our friend’s unconscious breathing changed slightly while it was read to her, but we’ll never really know one way or another. She was already alighting from this earth.
In this sort of crisis, we can only attempt to do whatever we can, and our friend represented this branch of our chosen family beautifully.
2.
It is odd that her exit from this earth was so close to the dates that the three of us, and a rag tag group of grad students, artists and musicians used to rent a house in upstate New York together this time of year in the years after College. The Fourth of July would either start or end our week together at “The Grateful Bed,” whose decor, if you discounted the sign, included absolutely no references to The Grateful Dead.
Walking home from the West Loop the afternoon after she was hospitalized, having wept for a solid thirty minutes on the bus on the way there, I found this wreath on the street near where Cabrini Green once stood:
It could not have been a more perfect representation of Fourth of July kitsch, which was a category at which she excelled. Picking me up at the Albany airport one Summer in late June with our friend L., she piloted us directly to an upstate New York location of Walmart (my first visit to one,) and there we stocked up on inexpensive and florid decor pieces for the upcoming holiday. She had an incredible gift for taking things very seriously and very unseriously at the same time. We were both marking the holiday completely in earnest in our own kooky way, and venturing into our treasured land of kitsch with a theme in hand.
I had missed the first year of this gathering in the relative country, but was present for most years thereafter, including our last year there, in which the fridge broke, and seemed to take our cohesion as a group in that space with it.
Nonetheless, until that year, our collection of traditions, which included a viewing of “Hard Ticket to Hawaii,” visits to “The Last Chance Cheese Cafe,” many nights of very inebriated karaoke, shared cooking duties and the sort of minor drama only lassitude, beer and the hormones of youth can bring, mostly held our rotating cast of characters together in a shared space of relaxation and yearly reconnection.
Of course, it was all her idea, inspired by Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History.” Only she could be inspired to consider the mostly wretched dynamic of a fictional group of friends who end up murdering each other and think “that could be the blueprint for a great vacation!”
She went on Google, found a place, rented it for a week, and invited us into a concrete manifestation of her wild and beautiful imagination.
3.
She and I were co-matron and mister of honor for our mutual best friend’s wedding, but for a few years after the New York State idylls ended, and after her own wedding and divorce, we had somewhat lost touch. It was not until Fall of 2020, when she called out of the blue to announce a new engagement, that we pretty much immediately picked up where we had left things a few short years before.
And then Covid hit.
Early into lockdown, I would write notes to myself while S. and I watched television together at night. One night, I foolhardedly wrote on my pad: “We should perform King Lear over Zoom.”
I was already starting to get over Zoom even that early into that bizarre period, but given the slippery gravel of mortality at that time, a grand gesture felt as possible or impossible as anything else did in that atmosphere of gnawing uncertainty.
I should have known this particular friend would never pass up the opportunity to make a grand gesture, especially if it involved challenging logistics.
The only more counterintuitive choice that performing a stage play over Zoom, would have been performing a musical, and so naturally we considered doing “Cabaret,” on Zoom as a possible follow-up, if we actually could pull off Lear.
I brought along non-professional actors from my social circle and family to this extravagant gambit, while she brought actual working actors from the Philadelphia theater, and despite losing an actor to play Kent three times in a row, the last one the day of production, we managed to pull off a mostly cohesive dramatic reading of the play—it was also chaotic, overly long, and some actors ended up double cast and even one quintuple cast, but the acting was phenomenal in many parts, and it was a transcendent group experience. I couldn’t sleep for two days after.
As the lockdown dragged on, we were able to mount two other productions, and much like our vacation cohort, the casts would both change up and remain the same, from production to production. To wit, S. played King Lear, a lusty sea captain and then a reclusive luthier looking for love in the three different productions, while her husband C. played Gloucester, Ezra Chater in Arcadia, and then a hereroflexible lifestyle guru in our final improvised play. (S’s idea to ditch a written script.)
She always had a knack for bringing disparate folks together, and compelling them to stay awhile in each other’s company.
4.
It is normal and necessary to consider questions of fairness when someone dies before even really reaching middle age. To ask “what else could she have done on this earth?” And also inevitably “what else could we have done together if this hadn’t happened?”
And my rejoinder to myself is: “Look what she actually did in this amount of time.” And: “look at what we actually got to do together in this amount of time.”
The last time we saw each other was two Summers ago. She was still dealing with grief of her own, but it seemed like perhaps that wound was maybe partially cauterized by then.
I picked her up in the South Loop in the afternoon, and we walked around Chicago until I had to go to work.
Her birthday was just a short time before she was hospitalized, and so of course we sent a collage. We don’t know if she ever received it, but we hope she did.
5.
The world is full of ordinary people, and nothing wrong with that, but she was an extraordinary person.
A townie who befriended a number of her contemporaries at the University nearby, she became probably the most successful of that group in her career, without the degree her cohort of friends were seeking when they met. So much so, she was basically retired before Covid hit.
And it wasn’t that she was highly enamored of the business world. A champion of fairness, she was bound to be endlessly frustrated in those spaces, but what she managed to do was to set herself up to pursue her interests outside that world when she could leave it.
6.
Ordinary people on vacation visit grand estates where their favorite period dramas were set, while extraordinary people fly to Copenhagen simply because they have a consuming interest in Nordic Noir.
Ordinary people reorganized their closets in lockdown, while extraordinary people chose to co-direct virtual theater on a medium just barely suited to the endeavor.
Both ordinary and extraordinary people can live long lives, but regardless of when she passed, the intensity of her loyalty, the frankness of her attention and the astonishing breadth of her imagination, all of which could operate to her detriment, helped her shape a not always simple to inhabit but also extraordinary life, that was purposeful, meaningful and generative of real magic.
When I was in College, I was on the phone long distance with my best friend, and she asked me if I’d like her to put on her then relatively new friend M. to say “hello.”
We both said what anyone would say in that situation: “I’ve heard so much about you…”
And then we started talking, and immediately knew why we were both so important to our mutual friend.
And then we continued talking, thinking, singing, making art and dancing together in this finite window of life.
Her hero’s arc had an end, as all such arcs do, but her heroism matters far more than her arc’s duration.
And I don’t carry her life as something that has passed. I carry her still as a spark, which is not extinguished in me, a spark which could at times catch fire and light up our ordinary lives in extraordinary technicolor, and still has oxygen in my imagination.
I got to be friends for three decades with an extraordinary woman. How hard to bid her goodbye, but even more impossible to imagine how much less joy there would have existed in my world without her.
