Introduction
I know Frank Marchand because he has been my plumber and neighbor for many years. He has always had a soft spot for going the extra distance. Now after eight continuous years of working and fighting stage four colon cancer full-time, he’s bringing his community into that same extra distance. Frank conceived, wrote, directed, and starred in Now I Can Die Happy, an original performance that Frank summoned to life at the Shea Theater in Turners Falls MA on August 30th. Too close to home to be theatrical. Too elevated a theme to be slice-of-life. Now I Can Die Happy is lived out on the most personal terms in the most revealing of ways.
Frank doesn’t say. But I imagine he was first visited by the idea of a one man autobiographical show in a long, contemplative moment. Perhaps during chemo?
Many chemo trips removed from the original diagnosis, Frank has outlived many of the crew in the same Cooley Dickinson treatment program. This includes former teachers, customers, and local folks that had been receiving their infusions alongside Frank.
This prompts Frank’s insertion of the “why me” directed to a higher power. You don’t need religion or infusions to appreciate the pay grade above where this question lands.
Frank answers back his why me voice without anger, guilt, defiance, or passive acceptance. His response is an ardent and clarion call to action. He has given himself over to the world of need. A world that defines tangible need as the privileging of one’s own concerns.
Big Digs in Own Backyards
Here’s the Frank I knew in B.C. (“before cancer”) times: A guy who took his professional calling seriously. Himself? Not so much. His work ethic was insatiable. Big jobs, small jobs. His answering machine played the same steadfast loop for decades: “I pick up my messages every hour.” He promised to return every new request by the end of each work day. Didn’t matter how overbooked he might be.
On the job, he was a swirl of activity and patter. The channeler of once troubled waters into the basin of stability. A chatterbox of wisdom. Behind every valve and fitting – a story and sometimes… a lesson.
The dedication, the range of problem-solving, and the self-effacing humor all conspired to build trust that Frank would unscramble whatever our steeply-pitched 150 year-old Victorian home could spray his way. It was a down payment. Not for curb appeal but infrastructure. Now our rickety Victorian would see an engine room facelift. Preventative medicine. Newly assembled sets of permeating radiators and plumbing bones. Nothing much had stirred under its floorboards until Frank descended into the foundation. Now our matronly manor was going to see another fifty years.
He emerged weeks later, a six foot mole caked in the abrasions of his craft. Our own bonafide big dig under Chestnut Plain Road, adjacent to the recently relocated Whately Milk Bottle edifice and neighbor Frank’s home. It was a pathway adjoining the 19th to the 21st centuries over the protestations of the accumulated neglect of past owners. Of course I wrote that check to Frank. Of course it’s the biggest check I ever wrote to another individual before or since. I took his word on every itemized entry in that invoice. And why wouldn’t I? I trusted the iron works and the PVC in the architectural details to the master cobbler of heating systems. My friend and neighbor, Frank.
Divorced Dads Night Out
Fast forward to 2000. Frank and I are sharing some bowls of All You Can Eat popcorn in South Deerfield before the waitress at Wolfie’s appears with our orders. We both find ourselves in the league of divorced dads with visitation weekends. It’s not exactly in our respective road maps of where our lives were once headed in the sleepy hamlet of Whately Center. Frank tells me of another neighboring family that’s split since: “Must have been in the water,” he reckons.
It was that hazardous backstretch around the turn to forty. So, so many marriages never make it past those bends. We see the stranger across the table from us and what have we got besides our vows, debts, and a shared history? The empty miles that distance us from the future we once called family.
Years later Frank tells Karen Brown that it was his ability to correct misbehaving water flows at the age of 12 which drew him into plumbing. Ms. Brown is both a Frank customer and an NEPM reporter whose radio portrait of his survival saga goes viral on national NPR. However, this form of troubled water was nothing Frank could fix. I clinked his beer glass to reaffirm my own limitations in this area. We go back for popcorn refills. Our unwritten chapters are no longer blank slates.
Full-time Schedule
I’ve been remarried, twice actually, since our last dinner date. My fourth marriage in 2015 coincided with Frank’s cancer diagnosis. He delivered this news the following year when I rang him in to prep a bathroom for the pending sale of my wife’s home. I can’t say it surprised me at all that Frank was dug in for the fight of a lifetime. What threw me off at first was the realization he was fighting what sounded like a war on two fronts.
At first I didn’t understand how his trade was actually an ally in this battle. Rather than attempting to protect his marshaling forces, he refused to draw any distinction between Frank the plumber and Frank the cancer patient. Others may have retreated into the shadows, of rejection and denial, or an even wholesale withdrawal from the business of living. Frank doubled down on it. His greatest nemesis wasn’t the disease or the prognosis. It’s the number cancer does on an idle mind preoccupied with the harm-seeking disruptions that lie ahead.
Rather than catastrophize, Frank chose to inhabit the solution-seeking sanctum of his problem-solving nature. He opted as Paul Simon described in song, “to dominate the impossible in his life.” That chemo treatment was another slot to fill in an already answered-for calendar of running toilets, clogged pipes, and vanity installations.
But the jammed calendar was never just to remain in motion. In “I Can Die Happy Now,” Frank implores us to step back from our own autopilots. He wants us to absorb the bigger picture so we can take in what’s truly life affirming in our daily practice. There’s nothing stoic or guarded or kept in reserve for later going on here. But the pep talk isn’t coming from fevered piety of sweeping judgments. That’s what we’re used to: Painted on thick with the broadest of brushes.
Smiling Statues
On a summer evening, my wife and I went to see Frank’s show at the Shea Theater. It stars its director, writer, and stage manager Frank. It co-stars Frank’s secret friend. There is no show program. But if there was, it might have been a single urgent message: Spend down our emotional debts.
As my Uncle Stephen Pollan wrote in Die Broke: A Radical Four Part Financial Plan, the last check you write should be to the undertaker. And it should bounce. From very different angles, Frank and my Uncle are imploring us to empty our pockets of regrets. But emotional debts, come again? These are the I.O.U’s that carry us through our daily graces. We come to know this as the kindness of strangers. Paying it forward. But Frank turns the tables. What if we’re the strangers and the kindness must come from us?
Frank isn’t evangelizing from his throne. He’s locked in battle. We’re the ones fleeing the scene and he’s the one calling unsolicited attention to this. Our strength as a community comes from engaging, from the providing and receiving of kindness and empathy. Not the protective shell we often grow to seal us in from the suffering all around us. Not the veneer of privacy that insists on scheduled interventions only.
Frank’s not having that. He pushes on the margins of emotional availability. On its fringes labors the panhandler who carries the shame of pity over the unfilled isolations that hold the awkward dread between the haves and the what-have-you-gots: I admit it, Frank. I haven’t any more to give.
And yet. And yet!
Knowing the pulse of gratitude that brims over Frank, we sense a towering waterfall of connection. A reservoir of feeling waiting to be shared. “Waiting for what exactly?” the man at stage four for the last eight years is asking us. As if we’re asking for our souls back from the places we’ve been hiding them. We can’t hide from Frank at center stage.
The Curtain Comes Down
The crowd is one part sorry-it-had-to-be-you, Frank, and another part frozen smiling statues. That’s when Frank goes one step further. He introduces back to his secret friend, a.k.a. alter ego that’s arrived to comfort and cajole him through the trials of his life. The secret friend has seen Frank through the perils of his solo missions. In the first act, the friend provided a comic foil when young Frank couldn’t get out of his own self-imposed obstacle course.
The friend is also cast as the keeper of Frank’s own bargaining with his maker. It’s an existence of light and energy that can only be shaped into action and outcomes in the fleeting expanse that this natural force inhabits a human body. The desire to bend events in our favor requires the gripping of hands, the stepping of legs, and the flexing of muscles commanded through our vast neurological circuits. Where our heart stops is not a curtain call. It’s not a thunderous ovation. It’s musical chairs where the music cuts out. That’s the theme song of Frank’s requiem.
Frank is not engaging us around the protective custody of angels and bugle corps. He’s bargaining with us where we live. At ground level. That’s where we leave no sincere praises on the table. We spend lavishly and don’t wait for Frank’s funeral. Or our own.
Think about it. The eulogy is off-limits to unkind words. There’s safety in the protection of legacy. It’s as timeless as the keeping of the flame. But what would happen, I hear Frank saying, if we let these praises escape through the mundane discourse of an ordinary day? Then we wouldn’t wonder if the dead could hear because they would bear actual witness to the appreciations they inspire. They would actually come to know the meaning of the lives they’ve touched in these overlapping lifetimes.
That is a world we can share. This is the do-it-yourself instructions for saving your own soul. No waiting is required. You can go right in. And thank you, Frank Marchand, for helping me to see and live that.
