Keep Moving

by Dick Van Dyke

  One afternoon, back when I was still shooting Diagnosis Murder, she was picking up some samples at a clothing manufacturer. She felt fine. On her way out, though with her arms full of clothes, she hopped over a low fence in an effort to get to her car quicker and felt a sharp pain in her chest, so sharp that she lost her breath. She didn’t know what was happening. She drove to the CBS studio where I was working on a new show and found me on the set.

  I took one look at her—she had literally turned purple—knew she was in trouble, and got her to lie down in my dressing room while we called an ambulance. Within minutes, she was being rushed to the hospital, where doctors determined that she’d had a heart attack. Michelle understood, yet she still wanted to leave the hospital immediately, and she put up quite a fuss. It was just her personality. In the end, she listened to the doctors and stayed close to a week, and the most remarkable thing happened to her while she was there: she quit smoking.

  None of us could believe it, including her. Michelle was a chain-smoker, one of the last and one of the worst. She used to smoke in the shower—that’s how bad her habit was. At one time I had been a heavy smoker, but I had quit and tried to get her to quit too. She never could until that stint in the hospital, after which she swore that the Jamaican nurse who took care of her did something to her—Michelle called it healing voodoo—because she checked out of the hospital and never wanted a cigarette again. I figured we had dodged a bullet. Even after the heart attack I still imagined myself leaving her a widow. She did too.

  As Michelle bounced back, my first wife, Margie, was diagnosed with cancer. I made sure she had the best care, and in 2008, after a tough battle, she passed away.

  By then Michelle was engaged in her own fight with the Big C. In the spring a nagging cough took her into the doctor, who found a spot on her lung. Long story short: they ended up taking out the whole upper half of her lung, followed by the usual unpleasant but necessary stuff, chemo and radiation.

  As an unshakable optimist, I thought she was going to beat the disease. It wasn’t going to be easy, but Michelle had the best doctors in the city and a spirit that was like a buoy in the open sea. No matter how large a wave crashed down, she popped back up. Radiation treatments were five days a week. After that we went to chemo, where I kept her company while she was on the drip. I ate sandwiches they brought around and watched TV. We followed directions and prayed. But her cancer metastasized anyway.

  Few words convey the sadness and helplessness of saying good-bye to someone you love, someone with whom you’ve shared every day for thirty-one years, as I had with Michelle. I remembered thinking back to the first time we met with her oncologist. Michelle asked, “Is there anything I can do?”

  “Well, you ought to be on the safe side,” he said. “It’s probably a good idea to get your affairs in order.”

  She never did get her affairs in order, nor did she ever marry me. How ironic is that? We had our own agreement, of course, but I wanted to get married for legal reasons and all the other reasons that kept us together for three decades.

  “Let me count the ways,” as Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote. She knew it too, but she always put it off, with a throaty laugh. Then it was too late, and I found myself listening to her say the things I had always told her: “I don’t want you to go through the obligatory year of mourning. . . . Life is too short. . . . Don’t waste time. . . . I love you.”

  I used to ask people, “Of all the things you enjoyed doing during your life and can’t do anymore, what do you miss most?” I had asked Michelle long before she got sick, and she said, “Having lunch with the girls.” Of course, she still could have had lunch with the girls, and she did go out with her friends, but I knew what she meant. She was talking about being young, twentysomething, when she went out with the girls, and all of life and its possibilities were still ahead of her. It’s a wonderful memory, a feeling that is worthy of a wistful smile and a faraway, dreamy look.

  Attitude. So much of life is about attitude—or, more accurately, having a good attitude. In terms of the death of friends and loved ones, attitude takes a backseat to being practical, to opening your heart and being practical about the fact that everyone lives and dies, and although we don’t get to choose the way we die, we do have a big say in the way we live.

  I also think belief is crucial. I believe in a Higher Power, whatever that means. It means something different to different people. I don’t think anyone can claim with absolute certainty to know what that means, only that there is a Higher Power, one we should respect.

  In terms of life, death, and an afterlife, I am a great admirer of author Norman Cousins, who suggested that upon death or after death, your soul probably goes on, but not your physical body. That ceases to exist anymore, and eventually it decays and disappears. Only your spirit survives, and in that realm you don’t have any memory of having lived.

  I think he’s pretty close there, as close as anybody has ever gotten to what happens, which makes the way you live even more important. It is the only time you have to recall and assess and account for those experiences, the connections you had with other people, the work you did, the words you said, and the friends and family you leave behind. So it’s worth making sure those scrapbooks are filled. Make sure you have fun. Make sure you smile and laugh. Make sure you live.

  Here’s a final note about Michelle: she spent her last morning alive on the telephone, talking with her friends. At noon she went into a coma—and that was it. The last thing she ever said to me was, “You made me a better person.”

  Then it was just me and our dog, Rocky, and all of Michelle’s things in the house, which suddenly felt very large and empty. It was October 2009, the day before Halloween, in fact. I remember going outside to put the finishing touches on my annual Halloween decorations, for which I was renowned in our neighborhood; I had contemplated taking the year off, but Michelle had insisted I go on with the show. I could hear her voice as I worked. The weather was still warm, and the yard was still green and the gardens in bloom. It was beautiful. It was all Michelle’s doing.

  But I couldn’t help thinking that I was supposed to go first.

  A Tribute to Old Friends*

  I wrote this dittty one afternoon in 2008.

  I would like to say a few words in tribute to a cricket who lives in my garden. Unlike the hundreds we had when we first moved here, he was the only one who showed up this year. He sings his little heart out, trying to make it sound like a summer night. It’s sad. My heart goes out to him, as it does to the Mariposa butterfly who flits madly around the flowers, trying to pretend it’s the annual invasion of former years. There is one dragonfly who has thrown in the towel, I think. He makes a couple of passes over the pool in the morning, but then we don’t see him anymore. We have three flies in the kitchen who do a pretty good job of pestering my wife.

  I found a nice environmental CD of rain on the roof. We were using it to get to sleep at night, but the neighbors complained we were running our sprinklers too late.

  We had a bee early in June. But he fell in the pool and drowned. Wouldn’t it be funny if next spring we weren’t here either?

  Sit or Get Off the Pot Roast

  As near as I can figure, the history of the pot roast is as plain and basic as the ingredients themselves. It seems to have originated on farms in the 1800s where the cooking was done in large pots dangling over a hearth. A big slab of meat and an assortment of vegetables were tossed in, and everything cooked slowly in natural juice, water, wine, or some kind of stock. Recipes began to appear in cookbooks at the end of the 1800s.

  By the early 1900s pot roast was standard fare in homes across America. The 1904 edition of The Modern Cook Book and Household Recipes included a recipe for “Braised Beef Pot Roast”; a similar recipe appeared in the 1937 version of My New Better Homes and Gardens Cook Book. And when André Simon described the roasting of a two-and-a-half-pound rump of beef in his 1952 book, A Concise Encyclopedia of Gastronomy, t
he pot roast was referred to as “an old Yankee recipe.”

  I mention this only because, while doing my research, I did not find instructions anywhere that a pot roast should be delivered weekly to someone who has lost their spouse. But as soon as word got out that Michelle was gone, my family and friends showed their concern by dropping off food. One day I came home and found a large pan of meatloaf on the front porch. Another time it was a baking dish of lasagna. Then someone brought a pot roast. Some dishes were delivered with reheating instructions; others came with a loving note, “Call if you need anything else.” Pretty soon what I needed was more freezer space to store the food.

  I like pot roast, meatloaf, and lasagna as much as anyone, maybe even more. As my wife, Arlene, has learned, my taste in food was shaped during my midwestern youth. My favorite meal, for instance, is fried chicken, corn on the cob, and mashed potatoes, followed closely by meatloaf, pot roast, and lasagna. I have never tired of any of these dishes.

  But the casseroles friends dropped off and the messages they left, “Dick, it’s me—and I want to come by with some food,” took on a momentum that I couldn’t keep up with. I could only eat so much, and my appetite had disappeared.

  Then I realized that the pot roasts were more than considerate goodwill gestures, more than mere precooked meals I could pull out of the refrigerator when I got hungry, more than a favorite recipe intended to help out until I got back into a routine. They were coded messages!

  It was as clear as the mozzarella on top of the lasagnas. All these meals were dropped off by women who were also single, many of them widowed themselves; they were letting me know they were out there—and available. It was as if a secret message had been sent to every widowed female of a certain age from Malibu to Beverly Hills: Girls, we have a live one. He’s eighty-three, he’s got all his marbles, and he can still dance. Perfect for the charity circuit. Get your pot roasts ready.

  At the gathering that followed Michelle’s service I had jokingly asked all the rich widows to move to one side, a light moment that drew laughter from everyone. But I wasn’t ready for a new relationship. Not then. Not a month later. Not several months later. Writing in the New York Times about his own terminal diagnosis, Dr. Oliver Sacks, one of my favorite authors, noted, at age eighty-one, that the deaths of friends and loved ones leave wounds that don’t heal. “There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever,” he wrote. “When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled.”

  That’s the way I felt after losing Michelle. There had not been anyone like her, ever. Certainly not in my life. She had been such a dominant presence. Even as her health declined, she ran things from her bed. The phone rang. I heard her voice. I heard her booming laugh. She wanted dinner—then nothing. Her absence left a giant-sized hole everywhere I turned. Someone asked how I dealt with the grief. I didn’t. I didn’t eat well. I forgot to pay bills. I declined invitations to go out. I fell off the track and didn’t know how to get back to living my life.

  I wasn’t alone. Rocky, our wire hair fox terrier, was equally bereft. He searched endlessly for Michelle, and then after a while, he parked himself in front of me with the same look of sadness, loss, and confusion that was on my face. I tossed his toy across the living room, watched him bring it back, and then tossed it again until he grew bored. He might not have understood what had happened to Michelle, but he knew she was gone. I tried to put things in perspective for him.

  “At least you don’t have a credit card that’s been canceled,” I said.

  That really happened. My card was canceled, and it wasn’t for lack of money to pay the bill; it was because I wasn’t organized enough to find the bill. That was indicative of the way things unraveled. I had to get it together. I wanted to, believe me. I had told myself repeatedly that I did not want to be one of those people who lose a spouse and stop living. I had seen that in others, both men and women, and I never understood why they let their lives change so dramatically. They quit going to shows, they stopped cooking meals for themselves, they slept late, they moved slower, and they turned into virtual shut-ins. Even when they went out, they were closed off. I did not want that to happen to me. I had promised myself it wouldn’t. I had promised Michelle it wouldn’t. We had promised each other.

  But it was easier said than done. I had never been single. As I said, I had a steady girlfriend in high school who dumped me after I got back from the Air Force. Then I got married to Margie. Then I was with Michelle. Then it was just Rocky and me in the house. I found myself apologizing to him. I promised to change.

  I said yes when Gregory Peck’s wonderful wife, Veronique, invited me to lunch at a restaurant in Beverly Hills and introduced me to a woman she thought I might like. We had a nice time, but she wasn’t my cup of tea. The same thing happened with several other friends who tried to set me up.

  Then word got out that I was dating, and my popularity skyrocketed. One woman waited for me every morning in my local coffee shop. She was like a well-intentioned stalker with a nice wardrobe. My phone rang constantly.

  I went on quite a few dates, actually—only first dates, mind you—but demand for a widower like me, as I discovered, was such that I might still be going on dates if it were not for my wife, Arlene. At the time she was my makeup artist and friend. We had met a few years before at the SAG awards and worked together enough that I felt comfortable going to her for advice. I had to ask someone—I was a novice. I hadn’t dated—really dated—since before World War II.

  So I would e-mail her a picture of the woman I was meeting and ask her opinion: “What do you think?” Or, “Have you heard of this restaurant?”

  At some point I realized that I looked forward to Arlene’s responses more than I did the dates. Pretty soon I quit e-mailing her pictures of other women and suggested the two of us get together. I liked talking to her. I liked her personality. I liked her sense of humor. I liked her take on things. I liked her smiles and her eyes. I liked everything about her. Indeed, I liked the feeling—and this came as a pleasant, unsettling surprise—that I liked her and wanted to be around her.

  Does that happen in your eighties?

  It sure does.

  There was just one problem: the difference in our ages: forty-six years. Ten years is not that big an issue once you’re in your thirties; a thirty-five-year-old man with a twenty-five-year-old woman is not a big deal. Twenty years is also an understandable choice, whether you’re in your sixties or your eighties. My brother is married to a woman in her sixties. No one questioned that gap when he was in his sixties, and now that he’s in his eighties, both of them look smart.

  But forty-six years was uncharted territory. Though I was quite sure Arlene knew I was smitten with her, I was not blind to the reality: we were nearly two-and-a-half generations apart, which was like being separated by three time zones, the equator, and another language. Or was it? Or was it not that big of a difference?

  I went over the pros and cons, making sure the pros outnumbered the cons, and told myself to be cautious, to take any next steps slowly. I knew that, at eighty-three, I was going to be the major beneficiary of socializing with a beautiful woman in her thirties. At the same time, I sensed that Arlene also enjoyed my company. We had worked together. We e-mailed. We talked on the phone. She occasionally came over and made dinner, or I would pick something up, and she checked in on me. It seemed safe to assume that she was thinking about me almost as often as I was thinking about her—and how to move our friendship into a relationship.

  As this happened, I began to feel like myself again. I turned the lights on again. I felt a lightness in my step. I looked forward to talking to Arlene. I had things to say. I wasn’t isolated or alone or lonely. It was the darnedest thing. After months of floundering, it was so natural, so effortless. Since then people have asked how I got through the tough parts of losing Michelle. The answer? I didn’t. What helped me through this tough period wa
s the same thing that helps in any tough situation, the same thing that had brought me luck when I was struggling in New York with a wife and three young kids when I left the TV station where I worked and auditioned for every play on and off Broadway in order to earn extra money: I opened myself up to the world and all its possibilities, and the world responded.

  In this particular instance, I opened my heart. I let life back in. I realized that if I wanted Arlene in my life, I simply had to take a risk. The choice was mine. And it was a simple choice: sit or get off the pot roast.

  What Do You Talk About with Her?

  My brother is caught up in a mystery, even though I have explained the answer to him numerous times. The mystery is my three-year marriage to Arlene. Each time Jerry looks at us, he squints his eyes, shakes his head, and asks, “What do you talk about with her?”

  He did it when we were eating lunch together recently. We were having a pleasant conversation about something we both had seen on television, when suddenly he looked up from his cake, shook his head in the direction of Arlene, and asked the question.

  I am aware he is asking much more than that singular question, and he probably isn’t even interested in the specifics of our conversations, which are obvious to anyone who is around us for more than thirty minutes. In reality, Jerry is saying, “My God, you were already in your forties when she was born. What could you possibly have in common? What are you doing with her? What is she doing with you?”

  It’s all those questions and more, even if it comes in the form of, “What do you talk about with her?”