Not Young, Still Restless (18 page)

Chapter Nine

Where Are They Now?

E
very veteran soap actor appreciates wrapping up storylines. We don’t leave murders unsolved (even when they drag on so long that nobody remembers or cares who the victim was, or if the victim shows up again alive and well and claiming to be an identical twin we’ve never heard of), we don’t leave falsified paternity tests unexposed (even when they come from as inept a facility as the Genoa City DNA lab), and we almost never let an established character wander off into nowhere without some explanation about where he or she might have gone (an explanation that, in real life, would probably involve the words “budget cuts”).

Since I am nothing if not a veteran soap actor, I feel compelled to wrap up some of the storylines in my life, especially since it will give me a perfect opportunity to indulge in a lot of bragging about my children and grandchildren later in this chapter.

T
here’s a famous episode of the classic
Mary Tyler Moore
series of the 1970s called “Chuckles Bites the Dust” in which Mary, to her horror, begins uncontrollably laughing at the funeral of Chuckles the Clown. If you’ve never seen it, I can’t urge you enough to get a copy of it. It’s hilarious.

It’s also an unfortunate glimpse of what I went through on the day we gathered to say a formal good-bye to my father.

Daddy and I had grown further and further apart after he left for the Canadian oil fields while I was still in high school. I remember seeing him at my high school graduation, but our visits from then on were very few and far between, although I did see to it that he met Corbin, Collin, and Caren so that they’d be real to each other rather than just nebulous concepts of “grandfather” and “grandchildren.”

For the most part, though, except for occasional phone calls, Daddy went on with his life and I went on with mine, which seemed to make us both comfortable. He met and married a woman named Judy in Canada, and the two of them moved to Alaska when his business in the oil fields took him there. I’m not sure I’d ever realized how young Daddy was when Mother died until it occurred to me that Daddy and Judy were married longer than he and my mother were. I think—I
hope—
that their marriage was a solid, happy one.

Daddy was in his eighties when Judy passed away. He went to live with my sister, Evelyn, and her husband for a while, and with my brother as well. I invited him to move in with me, but he wasn’t interested. I don’t doubt for a moment that we loved and respected each other. I just think we had so little in common at that point in our lives that we weren’t sure how to even start connecting, so if he had stayed with me, he would have been very well cared for while sharing a house with a familiar-looking stranger who happened to be his daughter.

A point came when he needed full-time care, for which he was moved to a nursing home in Taft. I went to visit. We smiled and talked quietly to each other. I remember realizing that I loved him, and I treasure those parts of him that
are
me, but I didn’t really know him. I wonder if anyone did.

Daddy died on April 11, 1986. Corbin and I drove to Taft the day before the funeral—a service, I was told, that Daddy, a man who had no use for organized religion, had prearranged. The family, including lots of aunts, had already gathered in the viewing room when Corbin and I arrived at the funeral home. I mean no disrespect to anyone else’s beliefs when I say that not for a moment, as I stood there beside that open casket, did I feel it was Daddy lying there in an alpaca sweater and glasses. It was nothing but a body, the vehicle he’d traveled in while he was here, a vehicle he’d happily abandoned and moved on from. He was no more in that body than I was, as far as I was concerned, but I did lean in close to him, in case he was hanging around eavesdropping on all of us, and recite the bedtime poem with which I used to tuck my children into bed:

Now I lay me down to sleep.

I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

Guide me through the starry night

And wake me when the sun shines bright.

(For the record, I know those aren’t the most common last two lines of that poem, but no way would I send my children off to sleep with the cheerful suggestion “If I should die before I wake” unless I were trying to raise a houseful of insomniacs.)

An impressive crowd of family members and Taft residents assembled in the funeral home chapel the next day to say a final farewell to Daddy. Again, remember, every part of the service was supposedly at his personal request, which, if the results were any indication, must have started like this: “I want a pastor who wouldn’t know me or my immediate family from a herd of cattle to officiate the ceremony with the help of a boom box.”

So sure enough, up the aisle came Reverend Somebody-or-Other, carrying a boom box the size of Michigan, which he set up on the podium and solemnly hit the Play button, treating us to a tinny, badly played organ solo of a hymn I’d never heard before in my life.

When the prerecorded music mercifully ended, Reverend Somebody clicked the Off button and launched into a somber, heartfelt stream of descriptive words and phrases about the “dearly departed.” It was a lovely tribute. Unfortunately, not a word of it even remotely applied to Daddy. For all I know, it might have been left over from a funeral the day before, and, pressed for time, Reverend Somebody simply decided it was such a hit that he’d just use it again.

Not that there wasn’t a personal moment or two. The reverend did acknowledge Daddy’s pride in his son, Jack, and nodded in the vague direction of my brother. Then, of course, there was Daddy’s “beloved daughter Evelyn,” on which he pointed to someone a good twenty feet away from my sister, prompting our entire row of Coopers, including Evelyn, to lean forward and crane our necks for a glimpse of the designated “beloved daughter.”

And sometime during the synchronized scanning for the new Evelyn, the boom box, and the sermon by a total stranger tenderly describing Daddy as everything from a professional tap dancer to an avid needlepoint enthusiast, I began to laugh so hard that I had to hide my face in my hands, so hard that I didn’t even notice Reverend Somebody’s failure to mention a word about Daddy’s third child, his beloved daughter Wilma Jeanne. If you’ve ever tried unsuccessfully to make yourself stop laughing, you know how excruciating it is, and I would feel guilty about it if it hadn’t been so involuntary.

When the service finally ended—with one more ear-grating selection from the “Barbie’s First Organ” tape on the boom box—we all trooped off to the cemetery, half of which is populated with my relatives, to bury Daddy beside my stepmother, Judy, at his request. I paused at Mother’s grave to pay my respects, and I couldn’t resist adding under my breath, “Thank God you’re already dead, because what we just sat through would have killed you.”

I didn’t cry over Daddy’s death. Not then, not to this day. I think of him and smile, and I thank him, with love, for giving me life and countless qualities I’m sure he genetically passed along, from his extroverted fearlessness to his sense of adventure to his reverence for this earth and all living things with which we share it. It might also be true that I inherited from him the very lack of sentimentality that kept me from crying when he died.

I did send a huge, beautiful wreath to the cemetery a few days later. There was no card, no indication at all of who sent it. It wasn’t for Daddy’s grave. It was for Mother’s, to say out loud that I thank her too, and always will.

I
swear that silly funeral made a lasting impression on all of us, including my brother, Jack, who, when he passed away in 2004, made it very clear that he wanted to be cremated. (For the record, I’ve specified the same thing.)

The six-year age difference between me and Jack prevented us from being very close when we were growing up. I loved camping and hiking and doing “boy” things with him, and I was proud of him for being a football hero and a great athlete in general. But when he left home at eighteen to get married, I was only twelve. And while we didn’t ever become especially close as adults, I can’t say enough about what a wonderful man he turned out to be. His marriage to Edith was a true love story, lasting more than sixty years, until she passed away a few years before he did. He was fun and funny, with a great, infectious laugh, and he was a devoted father who outlived three of his four children. He and Edith lived in Alaska for forty years, where Jack was a consultant in the oil business.

We saw each other at a long-ago family reunion, and I went to Jack and Edith’s fiftieth wedding anniversary celebration. The many miles between us kept us more separate than we meant to be, I’m sure, and frankly, so did Harry Bernsen—Jack, like the rest of my family, found Harry unbearable, and Harry made it apparent that my family was of no interest to him whatsoever. In fact, Jack and Edith would only come to visit on the condition that Harry wasn’t around. (Why didn’t
I
think of that?)

When Edith passed away, Jack went to live with his son and daughter-in-law, Chris and Dianne, in Stallion Springs, California, in their beautiful house by a golf course. Chris and Dianne took wonderful care of him, and the three of them loved traveling together until Jack began struggling with a nasty recurring staph infection. He was back and forth to the hospital God knows how many times. Finally one day, when his doctor wanted to check him in yet again, Jack said, “No more. I’m done. I’m staying right here.” He was eighty-three when he quietly, peacefully passed away at home.

I love the arrangement he and Edith made in their last years together: Edith was cremated when she died, and her ashes were set aside. When Jack died he was cremated as well, so that their ashes could be placed together on a rock beside the river in Oregon where they’d built a house, and the wind and the water could take them away, setting their spirits free to soar.

A
nd then there’s my sister, Evelyn, now eighty-seven years old. I hardly know where to start.

Evelyn is, without a doubt, one of the most fascinating people I’ve ever met. She and her husband lived all over the world, and when she was widowed five years ago, she began living part of the year with her son, Roy, and his wife and part of the year with me. (She’s a self-described nomad, so staying with either of us full-time makes her feel too confined.) It makes me laugh to think of the incredulity on our parents’ faces if they knew the two of us were spending months at a time in the same house together, and they wouldn’t be wrong. We drive each other crazy. We also adore each other. We would take a bullet for each other, although Evelyn would demand an explanation first.

We were born and raised in the same household, and all my life I’ve wondered if one of us might be adopted. If it weren’t such ancient history, I would tell you about how she used to get me in trouble when we were little girls and forced to take baths together; every single time she would suddenly yell, “Jeanne! Stop hitting me!” when I hadn’t laid a hand on her, so that I would get punished for no reason . . . or how she could be counted on to get a convenient stomachache when there were chores to be done. To be fair, when I remind her of those incidents today she looks at me with Oscar-worthy innocence and says, “Jeanne, I don’t know where you get these stories.” Maybe I just made them up. And maybe there’s life on Uranus.

Where Evelyn’s Oklahoma twang came from I’ll never understand, since I never had a trace of an accent. Nor can I make any sense of some of the nicknames she comes up with for friends of ours. Calling Peter Bergman “Mr. Military Man” I get, inspired as it was by his perfect posture, his perfect diction, and his impeccable manners. But one night, suddenly blanking on Lindsay’s first name, she came out with, “You know.
Spinelli
.” To this day she has no idea what brought it on, and to this day Lindsay happily answers to “Spinelli” when she’s talking to Evelyn, probably because she loves her, as do all my colleagues. In fact, at
Y&R
parties, everyone used to greet me with some version of “Jeanne! There you are! Come sit with us!” Since they met my sister, what I now hear is “Jeanne! Where’s Evelyn?”

She’s stubborn (I don’t know where she gets that), she spoils my dogs rotten (unlike me, who would never dream of such a thing), and she always has to be right . . . which, of course, is ridiculous, since I’m the one who’s always right.

She also doesn’t have a trace of phoniness or pretense in her, loves simplicity, and would much rather read a book or watch a football game on TV than go to a party, and during my recent viral infection that kept me in bed for two months (and God bless you, Michael Learned, for filling in for me so beautifully on
Y&R
until I was back on my feet), she was the best sister, friend, drill sergeant, message service, protector, and caretaker anyone could ever hope for.

She happens to be traveling with her son and daughter-in-law for a few weeks at the moment. I’m telling you, the woman exasperates to my wit’s end . . . and I miss her terribly and can’t wait for her to come home.

Evelyn, I love you with all my heart, and I wouldn’t trade you for any other sister on earth. But let’s not talk it to death.

O
n May 31, 2008, Harry Bernsen died of pneumonia at the age of eighty-two. His health had been failing for a couple of years, and he’d finally checked in to a Motion Picture & Television Fund health center several months before he passed away.

It’s an understatement to say we weren’t close then. We certainly weren’t friends. We saw each other rarely, when family functions dictated. It would be hypocritical for me to say that his death saddened me, but he was my children’s father, and I was proud of them for taking such good, loving care of him right to the end.

Harry asked that his body be cremated and that there be no public memorial service. Instead, there was a very nice private gathering at Corbin’s house for family, close friends, and a handful of Harry’s former clients. A podium was set up in the backyard with a life-sized, full-length cardboard photo of Harry placed a short distance away, facing the crowd, as if he were supervising the several speakers who stepped up to say a few words. And I must say, those who spoke managed to be both kind and honest, acknowledging that there were areas in which Harry was certainly talented, and revealing that (to my surprise) he’d been very attentive toward contemporaries of his who were retired and in failing health, checking up on them and visiting them when he could. Who knew? Good for him.