How do you break the news to your family that you’re dying – even when it’s on stage?
It was surprisingly difficult.
I died seven times in January. The first time, my family was with me. The other six? They were home, where they had things to do. It all went swimmingly.
I appeared in a community-theater production of Terra Nova, a play by Ted Tally, who also wrote the Academy Award-winning screenplay for The Silence of the Lambs. It’s about the doomed British expedition to the South Pole in 1912. My character slowly expires and remains prone and motionless for 10 solid minutes, right in front of his family, if they happen to be in the audience.
We live daily with the knowledge of our mortality. But in healthy families, we don’t parade it around much. Knowing the power of theater as I do, I thought I’d better warn my family that the concept of my impending, if fleeting, rigor mortis.
“Just so you know, I die. My character.” There was a beat, and then, matter-of-factly:
“Oh. Well, I’m glad you told me.” And then Teresa went back to folding laundry.
Our son, Joseph, was way ahead of me. (Bit of a history buff, and he had run lines with me.)
“Of course you do. All of Scott’s party did, right?”
Hmmm… Were they also choosing my casket?
I played Edward Wilson, the Cambridge-educated doctor and veteran polar explorer who was the group’s science officer. When the whole thing began to go south, if you will, he helped as best he could. Eventually, though, he would succumb like the others. My freezing to death was not shown literally, but the intent was clear.
And there I lay, trying to breathe as shallowly as possible to make illusion reality, wondering if I was some sort of symbol.
The playing dead we did as kids, too far removed from any experience of the real thing, was just that – play. So why did playacting dead as an adult in front of my family feel odd? Did it force-feed images that had been shelved for another day?
We had lost my own father just a few months earlier. I was all clear, in the abstract. He was almost 94, rejoiced in the good and endured the bad – a fine run, by any account. (Where do I sign up for that?) My anticipation of a world without him, contemplated over the years, was furtive, edge-nipping, avoidance stuff. “No need to think about that now,” I would always say. I knew one day I would have to. I knew against all reason that I would never want to. Now, here I was, “dead,” wishing he were alive to see me.
As our family works the wheel of grief for my Dad, unremitting in its slowness, perhaps my dramatic depiction of every person’s final fate wasn’t such a large deal. Properly warned, the family was not upset, at least not visibly. I left them to their own thoughts about it. If they had anything to say, they would, but I didn’t think I should prod. (“Hey! Whadja think about Dad kickin’ off?”) But it had to feel unusual. I’m sure they don’t relish the thought of my real death. I surely don’t like to think about either my wife or my son going before me.
But would it kill me to turn my imaginary corpse on its head? To focus on what we have instead of what we will lose? To think about how precious these days are, difficult though they may sometimes be?
No, it wouldn’t.
If my memory of my Dad’s voice starts to fade, now that – that might kill me. Slowly.
I’m glad I listened to it as often as I did.
Adam Barr is a journalist, writer, public speaker and occasional actor.He lives with his family in Basking Ridge, NJ.