Several Memories But Only One Conjecture

Overture:
From the movie “Patton”
(on the road to Bastogne to relieve the 101st Airborne in the Battle of the Bulge)
Colonel: Sir, General McAuliffe turned down a German surrender demand. You know what he said?Patton: What?Colonel: He said, "Nuts."Patton: Keep 'em moving, Colonel. A man that eloquent has to be saved.
I don’t know exactly why but this scene has been coming to mind when I think of Marcia Tarbis Tofteland, since I first read...
Prologue:
There are many…many more people in this world whose lives will be left with a far wider gap at the passing of Marcia than mine. The last time I saw her was on her back porch in Louisville, Kentucky exactly three years ago. Me, with my pregnant wife and dogs. She with her husband, Curt. Even then Curt and I did most of the talking.
Along with that, there will be far too many “I’s” in this tribute than I would prefer. The problem is I never asked all the questions I wanted to ask. I thought it rude.
Except for a handful of times, my conversations with Marcia consisted of quick five or six paragraph exchanges. Early on, it was shyness on my part. Later, I feared tiring her.
I write what follows not because my relationship with Marcia was anything unique. I write this because regardless of whether or not I meant a great deal in her life, she effortlessly contributed an immeasurable amount to mine. I write this because I have the feeling that there are literally hundreds of people that feel the same way and have similar memories. They may not all write them, although I wish they would.
Any memories of a life this eloquent have to be saved…
*************************************************

Memories:

It was a clatter. Behind me. I don’t know if the sound came later—in my memory—or was present at the time.
A little background:
Our show had been rained out. Monty Priddy, who had performed in every season at Kentucky Shakespeare Festival up to 1991, my first year, had made a bet with another member of our cast. That member had never done outdoor theatre before and was excited at the prospect of all the nights off he would get due to rainouts. Monty laughed and told this guy that it almost never rained over Central Park in Louisville during the Festival. To back that up, he bet the guy that he would pay him twenty dollars for every rainout if the guy would pay him one dollar for every show we did. The guy laughed at Monty’s stupidity and took the bet. I think we did forty performances that summer.
This was our only rainout.
In 1991, we almost always went to the Rudyard Kipling, The Rud, after shows. A bar. A restaurant. A concert venue. An art gallery. A place of infinite inspiration. My favorite place in Louisville. A place where I have many treasured memories.
The place where I first met Marcia.
I don’t know if I knew anything about the Producing Artistic Director’s wife. I tried not to ask questions about him.
One quarter; because of his demeanor.
One quarter; because I projected the invasive and intimidating nature of the head of my MFA program on him.
But fully half and mainly because I didn’t feel I belonged in there.
I was offered my internship at KSF so late… in April…exactly 18 years ago this month…that I had to FedEx my contract and measurements in so that my name would make the program. My guess was it was flattery to consider myself the second choice. I was a stopgap. I was a second year member of an MFA program that was only two years old. No reputation. I was surrounded by members of programs that were better established. My insecurity was on full display that summer. It was a time before I became comfortable with being the backup choice and making the most out of the opportunity. At that time I fancied myself as a misfit toy. Although I have a natural attraction to self-pity, this was a time before I even recognized it. Self-pity was just my natural state.
Perhaps it was this moment when I recognized it.
Remember Didi Conn? Not Frenchy or any of the other more outlandish characters you might have seen her play, but her when she played more normal types…or herself in interviews. It’s not a perfect match. I just find it is helpful for me to get a picture if somebody I never met is compared with somebody I might not know or know of. But the aura, the brightness, the presence was similar and evident from the very first moment.
That presence.
I was sitting with my back to the front door of the Rud. Sitting at a long table of interns and acting company members.
There was a clatter behind me.
She had that type of crutches that have cuffs at the forearm. I was in a mild denial, hoping that the crutches were for some temporary injury, but I knew better. Those were not the type of crutches issued for recovery from a knee surgery or ankle sprain. I still hoped.
Somebody told me who she was. She awkwardly squeezed in between a couple of tables and sat almost directly across from me. All of this done with a bright smile on her face. Quite the opposite of her husband, who up to that point, I don’t remember ever smiling.
I was in a panic. I might not be able to say anything. Or worse yet, I might say something stupid that would get back to her husband.
I got a reprieve. She talked to others she knew. But then she zeroed in on me.
How soon before she realized I didn’t belong there?
I told her that I went to school three hours north of New York City.
She told me that she lived in New York City for two years, where she studied at Meisner’s Neighborhood Playhouse.
I guess somewhere in the previous few minutes I had surmised that the reason for the crutches was some sort of a birth defect. I t is an unpleasantly revealing admission that I deduced her affliction must not be a birth defect from the fact that she had studied acting in New York . I then decided that she must have permanently injured herself in a wreck or other accident.
She immediately disarmed me when she said that she had lived in New York and studied Meisner. My memory may be faulty here but I don’t think Meisner technique was widespread, at least not among my fellow interns. It was one of the main approaches to acting taught at my grad school. I felt like nobody knew what I was talking about when I brought it up.
She was so familiar with me and so interested in what we were talking about that I forgot about being afraid of the consequences of speaking to her until I revealed that I constantly learned Shakespearean monologues.
I mentioned one in particular—the monologue of a major character. The image of her laughing with her husband about the absurdity of the “last second intern” being audacious or stupid enough to think he could play this character or others like him flashed through my mind. When I realized what I said I immediately qualified that I hadn’t learned the monologue because I ever expected to play the character. I did it purely as an exercise. She looked blankly at me and asked why I thought I could never play that character.
I mumbled something about not being good enough at Shakespeare nor the right type…
She cut me off and said that I could play any character I wanted to play.
I demurred. Older actors say this to younger actors all the time.
She got very serious and said,” No, you can play any character you want to play.” There was a mixture of “don’t be silly” along with a sense of something imperative in what she said to me…and those crutches… that it stuck with me all these years. More than all the similar comments made by others which came across as empty whether they were or not.
Then she went back to being bright.
I don’t remember who or when somebody told me she had Multiple Sclerosis. It must have been right after she left. I do remember the feeling I had when I found out.
A little over two years before, the wife of the chairman of the theatre department at my undergrad had died after a long battle with the disease.
Not again. Not to somebody who had won me over so completely. Not to somebody who made me feel like I belonged.
I don’t know if she always came across as that cheerful. The assumption would be that she had not. Over the past two weeks I have been looking up things she wrote and things that were written about her. I never knew that she was first diagnosed in 1982, the same year her only child was born. That would mean that she knew for nine years by the time she walked through that door at the Rud. For all I know, had I been a fly on the wall outside that door just before she entered, I would have seen a very different attitude. But all that is conjecture. And even though we actors love to draw conclusions on limited information, I have promised myself only one indulgence of that during this writing, and I’m not ready to use it yet.
************************************************
A few days after the Rud she came to the amphitheatre at the park, during a daytime rehearsal for the second show of the season. She brought her mother. It is appropriate that I mention Rose because she clearly raised her tough daughter and had her own inspiration to convey. And it is clear that what she held as important was evident in her daughter.
Rose had been an actress at KSF since the very beginning. She told me several stories about “the old days”. Among them she talked about her respect for Doug Ramey, the founder. She said the company would not have survived the thirty years it had if it had not been for his attitude. She said that “whether 20 people came to the show or 500 he always gave everything he had. That ethic swept through and inspired his actors.
Any performance I have given in New York or Chicago or all the theatres in between in front of a virtually empty theatre I have given with the memory of Rose telling that story and Marcia nodding approvingly.
*************************************
My first summer at KSF ended.
Eleven years went by.
During that time, I am surprised to think about how many of the monologues I once learned as “exercises”, I have been paid to deliver in front of audiences.
I played those characters.
Marcia told me I could.
**********************************
The next time I saw her was exactly eight years ago. April. I had been reconnecting with Curt over the previous few months via the internet. If those emails could ever be tracked down, floating in the ether, I have no doubt that the searching eye could divine a clumsiness. A dancing around the subject of family. More specifically, Marcia. I remembered my previous experience with MS at my undergrad. I was scared to find out if Marcia was gone. I don’t remember if I ever asked.
Curt brought her up. An audition in Cincinnati afforded me the opportunity to go to Louisville for a day. I used the excuse of wanting to do a couple of monologues for Curt. He said that he and Marcia would meet me after they got finished seeing a play.
I was so relieved to know she was still here.
I figured the fact that I was going on a Sunday, plus the fact that they had already been away from home for at least three hours due to the play they’d seen would keep the whole visit to about 30 minutes. And I would consider that generous of them.
I got there first and sat on the steps as they drove up. What happened over the next few minutes, made my heart drop like a grand piano through rotten floors of a many storied building. Curt got out while Marcia remained in the car. He got a wheelchair, either out of the trunk or back seat. He opened the passenger side, bent down and clutched Marcia’s completely paralyzed body against his, lifted her out and set her in the chair. The entire procedure seemed pretty mechanical which led me to believe it was something that had been done many times already.
I remembered my undergrad theatre chairman.
I thought it could be any day.
Eight years ago.
I think I only kissed her cheek. She looked so fragile I was afraid I would break her.
Curt worked me for three hours on my monologues.
All the way through, Marcia sat quietly watching and interjecting only occasionally.
I didn’t get the job in Cincinnati.
I got the job in Louisville.
Moved there in December, 2001.
Stayed until 2004.
“And that has made all the difference.”
The three most important years of personal and professional growth I’ve experienced in my life. The truth is both became the same there.
************************************
After all the pain and anger I had harbored since September 11th, 2001. After having two buildings fall two blocks from my wife.
It was a wince that began it.
Marcia arranged a birthday get together for Curt exactly seven years ago to this month. April. We sat outside behind a bar whose name I have forgotten.
At some point we began to talk about the state of the world. Small talk never lasted long around Curt and Marcia.
I don’t know how I ended up saying what I said. The smart money would be on the probability that we were talking about redemption. Curt runs Shakespeare Behind Bars and is a firm believer in the power of rehabilitation of both victim and criminal alike. I wasn’t arguing. But at some point I simply said with complete indifference:
“All I can tell you is that if I had Osama Bin Laden sitting in a chair in front of me right now and I had a gun, I would shoot him and sleep soundly that night.”
Marcia winced. I didn’t expect that. I also didn’t feel like taking it back. So I left it. But there began a process of looking at myself through somebody else’s eyes. Marcia’s eyes.
I won’t tell you what I believe she was thinking. That would be conjecture. Not yet. But I’ll cheat a little, because I remember what I was thinking:
Here was a woman who could barely turn her head because her body had been slowly quitting on her for 20 years.
It was my understanding that she had had her closest call to date that last winter when she contracted a particularly bad flu. In case you didn’t know—I didn’t—M S eventually compromises breathing to the point that the individual has greater and greater difficulty expelling breath and with it, dangerous viruses and bacteria that the healthy person can expel with relative ease.
I thought, in that moment, that the thought of taking a life—any life—with such indifference as I described must have a particularly offensive quality to her.
She was born and raised Jewish and it is a well known Jewish proverb that to “save one life is to save the world.” If that is so what does it mean to take one life? Or even to want to?
I caught a glimpse of myself as I must look in that moment. In dealing with someone else’s inhumanity, I was willing to surrender my own.
Even so, I kept my thoughts to myself and didn’t apologize. I felt completely justified. Besides, I was preparing to play Laertes in “Hamlet” that summer and I felt like such feelings would fuel me. Even though it is not a good idea for an actor to plan ahead what his character’s feelings are going to be, I felt it was pretty safe to assume that Laertes would be pretty angry.
I was looking forward to being angry every night of the run.
Like most things in life, what we expect is not what we get. If we cling to what we expect we are often disappointed. If we are open to what we get, it ends up being something we can still use.
Or in other words…
“If you try sometimes, you just might find…you get what you need.”
In my anticipation of being angry, I forgot what Laertes self-justified anger reaps. I was not feeling released. I was beginning to feel trapped every night. Then I began to divide from Laertes after performances and feel pity for him.
“There but for the grace…”
More and more that wince came back to me.
I began to think of Laertes and wince.
It has been a long held and little known maxim of mine that the Devil is a shrug. If that is so, then, in this case, an angel was a wince.
I never have gotten around to telling Marcia that.
I wish I had written this sooner.
*********************************
So many memories of observations over those three years.
************************************
I got to see Marcia’s mean streak once at a picnic.
She wasn’t always an angel.
She got into an argument at the theatre company picnic with our technical director over politics. She growled at him and he growled back at her. And so it went. I loved it. I wanted to laugh but didn’t. She could care so deeply about something.
He could feel so comfortable as to raise his voice to her because her soul was so formidable you forgot about her body.
*********************************
That body was so fragile. I never learned to hug it right. I started by just kissing her on the cheek. I was always jealous of Tina Jo, another actor in the company, because she knew how to hug her. When I bent down to do so, I fancied myself a caring ape trying to hug a feather. The one time I tried to hug her the way Tina Jo did, the last time I saw Marcia, when I backed away, her eyes were wide and I thought I had crushed her.
Ape.
I never hugged her right.
*************************************
In my last season, I played Iago. I wasn’t supposed to. The other guy quit. I wasn’t the first choice or the second. I don’t know which choice I was. I begged for the role and probably moved up a few places by doing so.
Right after I was granted the opportunity, I was walking to my car when I stopped dead on the sidewalk and thought, “What have I gotten myself into?” In case you don’t know—I didn’t—Iago is the third largest role, textually, in Shakespeare’s plays. I read through the lines that night and found it took me a little over an hour to do so. I had taken over roles before, but this was the largest role I had ever played and I had the shortest amount of time I’d ever had in my career to learn it. And it wasn’t just about the lines. Of course, I had to know it well enough to make it look like I had had plenty of time. I owed that to my fellow actors…and…yes… to my ego.
Any actors who were in that play may remember that I was scared. They may not have known just how scared. During the first couple of days when I would read through the lines with the cast, I was fighting hard to not worry about what all of them were thinking. I lost that fight a lot. I would go into the bathroom during breaks and just stare until I felt like I had gotten myself back together.
On Sundays, Curt brought Marcia to rehearsal. I think because it was her home care nurse’s day off. I don’t know.
By this time she could not hold herself up in her wheelchair and had to be occasionally pulled up and straightened. Then she would slowly tilt and slump back down. Curt usually pulled her up. But when he was not around, she would ask one of us to do it. Except for the slight fear that I might break her, I always felt honored when she asked me to do it.
She sat quietly that Sunday and watched us warm-up. And as we took a break before we started actual rehearsal, she called me over.
I assumed it was to straighten her up but I noticed she was already sitting up straight. Then she did something she never did before with me. She said softly, “Come here. I need to tell you something.” I leaned down and she whispered in my ear,
“I think this is wonderful that this has happened.
I am so happy.
You are going to be great!”
For just a moment, we were thirteen years younger and back at the Rud.
It would be disingenuous for me to say that that comment was what made me succeed. For one thing, I consider myself a professional and I would have accomplished what was necessary regardless. For another, it is not my place to say whether I succeeded or not. I simply loved doing it.
I loved every moment of performing that role, from the time that I heard one thousand people gasp (and possibly wince) when I simply said, “Strangle her in her bed”. To the time something dislodged, or flew, into my throat rendering me unable to speak a long speech and Othello, Phil Cherry, had to step in and cover for me.
I will claim that Marcia’s words humbled me so greatly that they have brought tears to my eyes when I have thought of them ever since. And I do know that every time I became tired or thought my head would explode if I went over a speech or scene one more time, my mind immediately went to those words and they calmed and focused me.
Of course I could accomplish this.
Marcia said I could.
There is a joyful irony in this memory; A few days before the show closed, Marcia called me over again and told me how proud she was of me. She said something like the simplicity and indifference with which I said the most terrible things in the play were so unsettling to her that she was frightened of me. Then she shuddered—akin to a wince.
********************************************
It occurs to me as I write this that I could be giving the impression that I thought of Marcia as some sort of inactive symbol. A mascot. A resigned inspiration to those of us more ambulatory.
No.
I was aware at the time that she was constantly writing articles for publications that dealt with Multiple Sclerosis. She would occasionally show me some new contraption she’d acquired to help her write.
The disease advanced but she only adjusted, she never surrendered to it.
Before that she worked for Actors Theatre of Louisville and other organizations until the disease would take a little more of her physical freedom. Occasionally I find one of these articles, but my favorite thing she wrote has nothing to do with MS. It is something I found that she wrote about the day her son and only child, Joshua, was born. I’m grinning as I think of it now. It gives such an insight into her character. She was actually having an important meeting for Actors Theatre while she was in the delivery room.
I learned something from these articles and hearing what I heard about her life within those 11years between my internship and my company membership. The most important thing I learned from her is that one doesn’t die from MS. The life expectancy is certainly shortened in many cases. But the bigger challenge of the disease is that it continually advances and one must either surrender to it or live with it.
She never surrendered.
Final act
It was not the last time I saw her. But it lingers as the last, because it is the one with the conjecture. It is the second to the last.
My wife, Julie, and I were moving to Chicago the next day. Othello had closed a few days before. Curt invited us to have dinner with Marcia and him at the Irish Rover on Frankfort. We sat in the front room, Curt and Marcia with their backs to a wall. Julie and I with our backs to the window.
A thunderstorm blew in as we ate and Marcia became more and more nervous and unsettled. I’d never seen her that way before. She had spoken about the great Tornado that came through Louisville in her youth once before in my presence—the day she winced at me—and she had certainly seemed troubled by the memory.
She was growing more agitated and scared.
I could hear the thunder behind me but I wasn’t alarmed. I grew up in Odessa, Texas and had experienced many thunderstorms that sounded the same. I continued to crack jokes and make light of the situation. Eventually her agitation persuaded me to turn around and look out the window at the other end of the room.
The wind had to be blowing easily over 60 miles an hour. I could see branches flying and bouncing past in the street.
The storm passed. As did the evening. We said our goodbyes.
As Julie and I drove back to our apartment to sleep our last night away as residents of Louisville, we took a serpentine route between large branches and small trees that laid in Frankfort Ave. and Shelbyville Rd. It was a longer drive out than the one in because of those branches and because every traffic light was out between the Irish Rover and our home.
The next morning, while walking my dogs I discovered that a huge tree that had to be over fifty years old had fallen and had totaled two cars and a neighbor’s apartment. I said to myself as I looked at the destruction, “I guess Marcia knew what she was talking about.” It had been a refrain. I had said it during the drive back the night before and when we checked the weather on TV that night before we went to bed and found that tornadoes had been spotted all around where we had been.
Conjecture:
I believe there was always a storm in Marcia’s peripheral vision. But she kept it at bay by focusing on her life and the people in it. She always kept them in the foreground. She always focused on them. That night a more literal storm caught her off guard and shook her sense of helplessness.
MS continually crept forward demanding her surrender taunting her will to live.
She told it, “Nuts.”
It had been nine years since she had been diagnosed when I met her. By that time, I believe she became perfectly aware of what value her life could have. She knew perfectly well what weight it held for her to say to an insecure intern, “You can play any character you want to play.”
How many other times since that night has she had a similar effect on somebody in the outer circle?
It didn’t matter what look was on her face outside the door. Her heart was the same on either side.
I have been getting up over the past two weeks and working out. Pushing myself a little more. Celebrating Marcia as I do it. I understand she danced before I met her. The workouts are my dance for her these days.
How many other people are celebrating her?
For how long have we been celebrating her?
Kentucky Shakespeare Festival and all that it did during the ‘90’s and early 2000’s was special and driven. It was like no other place I ever worked. More inspired. More manic. More artistic. More beautiful. More exhausting.
I believe the reason was Marcia. The Curt I knew in 1991 was driven. But rather than being more mellow in 2001 when I found him again, he was more driven, though also more peaceful. What effect had Marcia had on him? What effect did she have on the prisoners who saw her every year while they worked on changing their lives through Shakespeare Behind Bars? On the teenagers who came every summer to take part in the camps? The interns who seemed to become more devoted every year? My fellow company members?
Me.
************************************
I finish this on the day that Marcia Tarbis Tofteland left this life, although I have been writing it for almost a week.
The truth is I’ve been writing it for fifteen days. The first eight in my head.
It was her call. She had contracted pneumonia and her body no longer possessed the ability to cough. When the doctor came in to say he would have to put her on a breathing machine, she quickly and simply said, “No.”
She told her family that it was not a case of wanting to go. She wanted to stay. But her body no longer possessed the ability to keep her here without the aid of heroic and ultimately futile measures.
She won. Multiple Sclerosis never took her Want to live. It only took her ability to. The storm completely surrounded her but she didn’t panic. She didn’t give into the disease’s taunts or her fear.
She won.
Seven years ago, after that close call, I told her story to my mom. I said I wasn’t sure how much longer she would be around. My mom was quiet for a moment. The she said—her voice cracking:
“Well…she got to see her son grow up.”
It seems appropriate I should add that.
It was completely expected that her last breath would be taken within hours after she made her decision and went home.
It took fifteen days.
Emails were sent daily or twice daily from the family giving updates. Most of the recipients are a part of the theatre so even though we expected the quick ending we know the better stories are the more complicated, difficult and unexpected ones. However, when the ending comes it seems much more fitting to the entire piece. In this case, the life of Marcia Tarbis Tofteland.
Her body had given up long ago. Her mind was quieted by sleep and morphine.
Her heart held on for two weeks and was the one to turn out the lights at the end.
Of course it would.
In all the years I knew and knew of her, life didn’t come easily to Marcia.
Why should death?
But life still came to her and she took it and made something beautiful out of such incredible personal difficulty.
******************************
I wrote once, after my maternal grandmother died, that when somebody dies, they become fictional. I always felt that this was more clever than true. But still a little true. It is more accurate, though less succinct to say that they become fragmented by many different people’s memory. And those fragments, if taken as the whole, become fictional.
My Marcia Tofteland is not somebody else’s. I could write my observations of her family, for instance, but those are purely that; observations…conjectures. That story would be more interesting but it is up to them to either tell it or not tell it.
This is my Marcia Tarbis Tofteland. A very small fragment of the whole. But it was more than enough to enrich my life beyond anything I expected…
… when I first heard the clatter.
***************************************
I had meant that to be the end but Bob Dylan just came up on my shuffle and he is singing “Shelter from the Storm”.
Thank you, Marcia.
****************************************
Epilogue:
I have never, in my adult life, liked referring to the higher power I trusted in as “God”. It just seems way too confining. Curt would refer to the Universe. I liked that and adopted it. And it always seemed that in my dealings with Kentucky Shakespeare Festival, mine and other people’s steps were guided more clearly by the purposes of the Universe.
Example:
On Saturday, March 28, 2009—the sixth day that Marcia could have left us at any minute—I was compelled to go buy dog food. This demanded that I take an empty duffle bag on a bus, since I don’t own a car, down Lincoln Avenue in Chicago to a store on Ashland that carries the special food I need. I then would have to put a thirty pound bag into the duffle and lurch my way back to the bus stop.
I had been thinking about Marcia all day. I wanted to find some way of honoring her.
This was the first time I had been to this particular branch of the pet store, so, since my mind was on something, I went the wrong direction when I left and walked a whole block before I recognized my mistake. What should have been a relatively easy one block walk to the stop, ended up being a bit more annoying three block walk.
When I got back to the door of the store, I saw the Lincoln Bus, my bus, pass the intersection. Had I not been so absentminded, I would have just caught it. Since that particular line is not known for being terribly frequent, this was especially…
I didn’t get angry. With all that was going on it seemed a bit silly. I remembered Curt’s Universe and decided to keep myself open to the possibility that there was a reason for this relatively minor inconvenience.
When I turned the corner from Ashland to Lincoln, I was consoled to see an empty bus shelter with a bench. I got to the shelter, tossed the bag onto the bench and glanced at the poster on the single wall of the shelter.
It was an ad for a walk to fight Multiple Sclerosis on May 3rd. I would not have seen it if I had made the earlier bus.
I choose to fight Multiple Sclerosis.
I have spent many years overwhelmed by the number of diseases that have affected the lives of those around me. Because I could not choose one, I did not choose to fight any.
In World War II, I had one uncle on Iwo Jima. Another fought at Guadalcanal. Another was on a hospital ship which faced withering attack from Kamikazes. I had friends whose fathers and grandfathers fought at Normandy, North Africa, Italy. One even marched to Bataan.
Not a one of their periods of service were any less important to the overall cause.
I have a friend who fights Ovarian cancer. Another who fights Alzheimers. A third who fights Cystic Fibrosis. Not a one of their causes are less important than mine. Not a one of their causes are any less important to the overall cause:
Humanity.
Another thing about those who fought that war. They have been termed the “Greatest Generation” because they also lived down the Great Depression. One of their accomplishments that is not mentioned often is that they took the original steps that would eventually eradicate Polio.
You know how they did it?
They saved their dimes.
In the most difficult of economic and warlike times, they found the ability to make Polio a priority as well.
And they beat it.
I choose to fight on the Multiple Sclerosis front. I give my support to those who fight on other fronts because, who knows? They might be fighting for me or somebody I love and I don’t even know it yet.
As I stood in that bus shelter, I imagined ticker tape parades for survivors of all these dreaded diseases and the scientists who did the work. “Victory against Breast Cancer Day”. “Victory against ALS day.” “Victory against Juvenile Diabetes Day.”…
…”Victory Against Multiple Sclerosis Day.”
Such wonderful celebrations. Such possible celebrations. Such real enemies.
I did slight struggle that day in the shelter with that brand of narcissism which believes that had I started doing this the day I first met Marcia, then she might still be alive…and cured.
Silliness.
Had I thought of it back then, I might have a reason to kick myself, but, for whatever reason, the thought didn’t occur to me. It occurs now.
In these last fifteen days I have heard from friends from almost every major era of my life: Two high school friends. One has a parent suffering from MS. The other has a good friend. From my years in New York, I know a woman whose mother battles relapsing remitting MS. From my grad school days, I have learned that a woman I knew back then, Michelle, has recently been diagnosed with it.
Not again…
On May 3, I walk in honor of Marcia, but I will also walk for all of them. I will do so every year until this disease is defeated. I hope to find more ways to fight but this, forgive the pun, is a first step and a lifelong… if necessary… commitment…
…and then I will move on to join one of my friends on their front.
And we will, someday, beat them all.
Marcia said we could.