TRIBUTE TO MY HUSBAND

He died four years ago on this date. I share again what I'd offered at his memorial.

RENÉ.

Desmond has a barrow in the marketplace
Molly is the singer in a band
Desmond says to Molly, girl, I like your face
And Molly says this as she takes him by the hand

Ob la di, ob-la-da, life goes on, bra
La-la, how the life goes on

Do you ever know who you’re marrying?  What that person seems to be at that moment is hardly the person that you’ll come to know as time goes on.  It’s really the luck of the draw.  I’ll stick to that point of view for just about every union.  Rene and I, within our one enduring contract, had many marriages, with aspects of ourselves that only time and age and shared experience, disaffections and re-commitments, would reveal.  Hallelujah.

We were absurdly young.  I was a teen-age bride who was at hand and willing when JFK said married men wouldn’t be drafted.  So we got married.  Not necessarily a binding reason for someone to say ‘I do.’  Was he marrying me for ME, or for himself?  Being the ninny that I was, that didn’t occur to me then.  That thought only occurred to me retroactively. 

This guy was quite a catch in our microcosmic universe of drama school.  Before we’d ever actually spoken, I first saw him dazzling audiences in main stage shows, and his levitations were cosmic.  He, in his senior year, was unquestionably The Big Man on Campus, and I was a lowly malleable Freshman.  He really knew how to seduce me.  He pulled out all the stops of his European aristocratic pedigree.  My family had come from those European huddled masses, and he was the scion of Swiss artists and writers.  His mother actually came from French nobility.   He waved pinwheels in front of my eyes and I was hypnotized.  Lucky me.

He didn’t know who I was then – because I didn’t know who I was then. Instinctively, though, I knew that life with him could be a good ride. 

He certainly loved clowning.  He could be pretty goofy.  This Goofy ended up marrying Minnie Mouse.  He didn’t marry Olive Oyl, and he didn’t marry any Daisy Maes, although I believe he considered it…  More accurately, he actually ended up marrying bossypants Lucy Brown.

I had a veneer of sophistication from my high school years in Manhattan, but I really didn’t know jack about life yet.  We both needed to live life to learn life.  And amazingly, through thick and thin, we traveled along, singing our song, side by side.

In HIS persona, the concept of ‘actor’ didn’t carry ANY connotations of uncertainty, rejection, or insecurity.  He broke fast from the starting gate, and never broke stride.  He had presence, talent, charisma, ambition, and ego – and he delivered the goods every time.  Mostly brilliantly.  Some of you were privy to what he was capable of onstage in his truly great classical performances of Moliere, of Shakespeare, of Chekhov, of Beckett.  He’d fill every corner of a theatre with spectacular stage presence and virtuosity.  His admiring colleagues called him the Shakespeare of all actors.

He was a pro from start to finish.  Sometimes there were hints of temperament while working; he‘d bristle at injustice or hierarchical challenges, but mostly his colleagues knew him as generous, charming, and skilled.  And a team player.  He knew the value of that.  He balanced being a divo with being an ensemble player.   That takes a special skill all its own.

Unquestionably he matured in his career and his profession.  But he never really strayed from being something of the Magical Child in the corner making mudpies.  He had an uncommon gift of creativity in many directions, he had an eye, he had the hand, always he’d create: drawings, photos, cartoons, wire sculpture, whimsies of every stripe.  His joy in being fully connected to his child-like freedoms of imagination was ever-present (aided and abetted, it is true, by his pleasure in getting and being stoned and unlocking his flights of fancy.)  He was quite The Actor.  And he was quite The Artist.

The vested success of my mate, though, is more deeply embedded in the fact of Rene the person, the human, taking precedence over Rene the Artist and the Actor.

As someone said:  ‘You are you.  You are not your job.’

As charismatic as he was, he was, as I was, flawed, of course.  Imperfect.  We were two Persian rugs with mistakes woven in, so as not to seem perfect in the eyes of God, or in our case, in the eyes of the outside world making assumptions about us.

Somewhere someone else said that long-term monogamy delivers uneven tempo, alternating between major and minor keys.  In our fifty-six years, just about everything that might happen in a long marriage did.  He was nothing if not quixotic.  We both had epic displays of temperament, arguments, pettiness, conflicts.   I once took it into my head to wash a sweater he loved.  He loved it so much that it needed a wash.  So I just thought I’d throw it into the washer and it felted and shrank to Lilliputian proportions.  He went ballistic.  He was completely bummed.  And even more bummed when I cut it into pieces to make a tea cosy out of it.  But we always got over silly bumps like that.  Rene had overarching, upstanding unswerving loyalty to me, to us, even when I was at my smallest, no puns intended. And even when he behaved like a jerk, he had a basic moral core, an innate deep-seated morality that truly humbled me in those moments when I’d step away into objectivity about this man, my husband.

We did fight a lot.  The Bickersons were often our avatars in the car.  We played brinksmanship; we came close to breaking apart.  In the early days, I was unquestioning about his right to occupy center stage.  Later:  Hey, Goomba.  I’m here, too.  When we had children ten years after we’d taken up with each other, the dynamic changed:  I became quite the dominant one in our domestic life, similar to a proper Muslim wife who ruled the roost inside the walls, and he deferred to me hugely.  After a while, that didn’t work out so well either.  We had to work as time went on to altogether restore some balance. 

If you encountered us in the street in any period of our life, I might indeed be five paces behind him.  Not because I wore a chador, but because his legs were longer.  Often he had to stop and wait for me; then his legendary impatience would kick in.  And in his elderhood he was almost a cliché of a cranky old man if a stranger crossed him.

‘Every life starts with the same beginning and the same end.  The rest is the story.’    

We were destined, it seems, to go more and more deeply into intimacy, the intimacies of ourselves, our souls revealed to each other.  Fearlessly, but it took a long, long time.  We evolved together, as a couple and as individuals.  It became clear to us that we were in it for the long haul.  Our roots had entwined.  An ancient tangle.  Ultimately it proved to be inconceivable that we shouldn’t be alongside one another til death do us part.    

He was such a good daddy.  No way to know that about someone until you’re in the thick of it.  When the children were little, he’d croon Beatles songs to them to put them to sleep.

He just adored his children, his home life, his family, and eventually his grandchildren.  He was truly present for his children and with his children.  And here’s the thing about him that I really want you to know.  His life was enough for him.  That’s what he showed me about living life.  He was competitive more on a micro than a macro scale.  He was aspirational, but he wasn’t inclined to be a Sammy Glick, out plying his ambitions, ever-striving in the indifferent world at the expense of his family. 

We enjoyed prosperity when it came our way thanks to the value of his career, but it was never about money.  It was about having ENOUGH money, to live well, to bask in the largesse of a good life, to open it to our family and our friends, for me to exercise my own abilities at householding and homemaking and being able to give our children the privileges of education and opportunity, and thus Rene could comfortably and keenly keep on making his magical mudpies, his happy visions in his magical corner.

Star Trek came along.  Thank you.  It opened up our life in two major ways:  we had the opportunity to travel seemingly everywhere as a result:   Europe, Australia, New Zealand, South America…  He didn’t, however, feel entirely right about all that fan adulation translating into hard cold cash, just for us, so he sold his autographs on behalf of DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS.  He was just that kind of guy.  A GOOD guy.  A considerate guy.  He’d grown up in a houseful of sisters, and like Kobe Bryant, he never left the toilet seat up.

And Deep Space Nine afforded us our own deep space:   Thus we embarked on the adventure of building a house for ourselves far from the madding crowd, outside of the hurly-burly.  He truly loved what was elemental, which is why he loved Boonville so much.  Air.  Sky.  Voluptuous hills.  The reasonable per capita of Mendocino County.  The lack of pretention.  The sheer physical beauty of California still to be savored in a relatively unaltered state.  The tranquilities of hawks overhead, gliding, wheeling, hunting…  The absolute bounty of his worldly success, the luxury of getting into his pool, naked, private, joyful…  In the face of his complexities, he was a very basic man after all.  I was the more elaborate one.  And he let me be.

But nothing lasts.  As George Bernard Shaw said: ‘Don’t try to live forever; you will not succeed.’

These are The Five Remembrances from the Up-hajj-hatt-hana Sutra:

1.  I am of the nature to grow old.  There is no way to escape growing old.

2.  I am of the nature to have ill-health.  There is no way to escape having ill-health.

3.  I am of the nature to die.  There is no way to escape death.

4.  All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change.  There is no escape being separated from them.

5.  My deeds are my closest companions.  I am the beneficiary of my deeds.  My deeds are the ground on which I stand.

This is the season of MY life in which I have had to say good-bye to him, who I loved. It’s the time in life for such loss.  How fortunate that I am strong enough now for it.  How blessed my life has been to have such appropriateness.  

It’s just death.  It’s right.  Nothing can be more right than death, not even birth, unless death happens suddenly, or at the hands of violence or because of barbarism.  The way he approached death was as fine as the way he’d lived his life.  He certainly wasn’t in denial.  He had come to terms with his terminal cancer.  He acknowledged his mortal weakening and physical failure.   He wanted to spare himself and us the endstage suffering, and so he embraced his legal right to exercise that autonomy.

When he was approaching opening nights in his theatre career, I’d become aware of his going inward for the interior psychic preparations he’d make as the moment came closer.  So it was with his final preparations, for his closing night, as it were.  In his last days, he couldn’t speak any longer, he could only whisper.  His last twenty-four hours were comprised of the quotidian: Remy giving him a bath, the ordinariness of our family in our living room, with him swaddled on the couch, with grandchildren in and out.  That’s all.  That was enough.

On that last Sunday morning, December 8^th, it was wonderful and intense. “In even the worst deaths there is a great burst of life.”  It was one last time to simply be within our nuclear family: he and I, Tessa and Remy, the family of four he and I had made.  Let the rumpus begin.  We listened to the 60s music of our youth, we laughed, we cried, we danced, he waved his arms in rhythm.  ‘Oh, please don’t go,’ we said.  ‘We’ll eat you up, we love you so.’  But he did.  He eased away, to Where the Wild Things Are.

And when he was gone, it felt a little hasty after all.  There’s always more that you want to say, that you want to tell - but the doves are in hand by then, and… you, he, we… release…

Our dogs were never allowed in our bedroom.  That morning they stayed just outside quietly, listening, hearing the anguish and the sobs, divining the primal process.  Afterward, they followed his laundry, needing to investigate it before it was washed.

He’d sent out a parting email to be delivered posthumously:  a link to Monty Python’s rendition of Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.

In the months of aftermath, I found myself rinsing blueberries exactly as he did.  I finished the last bit of soap that he’d used.  Alone in my house, I listened to the clocks ticking, as in an Ingmar Bergman film…

It’s not what I’ve lost.  It’s what I’ve had.  Love.  Connection.  The deepest expression with another.  With my mate of fifty-six years.

I’ve read about “the worn stones of conjugal life.  All that is beautiful, all that is plain, everything that nourishes or causes to wither.  It goes on for years, decades, and in the end seems to have passed like things glimpsed from a train – a meadow here, a stand of trees, houses with lit windows in the dusk, darkened towns, stations flashing by – everything that is not written down disappears except for certain imperishable moments, people and scenes.  The animals die, the house is sold, the children are grown, even the couple itself has vanished…’

Forgive me if I’ve gone on too long.  But we together, Rene and I, had an incredibly rich large life.  He was a Man in Full.

(Cited:  Katie Roiphe; James Salter…)