Playwright Terrence McNally died of complications from Covid-19 on Tuesday 24 March. He was 81, a cancer survivor, immunocompromised. He wrote a play that felt like homecoming to me, when I read it at a strange and difficult time, and the news of his passing has left me feeling bereft. The world was a better place for having him in it.
I am thinking of what we were told, at first, and what I desperately wanted in the first instance to believe. It’s just like a seasonal flu; it’s not going to affect the young, not that badly. I regret that I ever wanted to believe that, now. I have family members who are highly susceptible to Covid-19 — grandparents approaching 90, an aunt with chronic respiratory problems, a father who only recently came through a bout with prostate cancer. You panic, is the thing. You don’t want to believe it will touch you, and so you don’t believe it, as ferociously as you can. It’s a terrible, careless reflex. Imagine jerking your hand back from a burning stovetop, only to elbow someone you love squarely in the gut.
Our very own Prime Minister told us, in the early days — and doesn’t that sound bizarrely apocalyptic in its own right? the early days, as though there will be a retrospective of the last days eventually — that many people will lose loved ones before their time. This was supposed to be an acceptable condition, or at least a permissible one. He doubled back, too late. In the days before the UK entered lockdown, I saw throngs of teens huddled together outside the supermarket. I went in to pick up fresh milk and hand soap, only to see more of them inside, crowding the aisles, messing around. I have every respect for teens; if you are a teen and you’re reading this, I can only assume that you are very cool and given to good decisions. I was so angry when I left the supermarket that evening that I caught myself hoping they would get sick; I wanted complacency to cease to be an option, for any of them, for anyone in the world.
I regret that, too. Different reflex; same basic principle.
In my third year of university, on the recommendation of my then-partner, I read Love! Valour! Compassion!, in a battered second-hand hardback edition scavenged from some corner of the internet. We were long-distance, and I was severely depressed; my room that year was in a tower, and I held myself apart from the rest of the world accordingly, painfully lonely but incapable of reaching down a hand. It’s a play about a group of friends who spend a succession of weekends together, always at the same holiday house. It is, more specifically, about gay culture, and the AIDS crisis, and the sharp and unexpected losses that are second nature, almost, to us. It’s about forgiveness and love and passing the torch — which is to say, it’s about getting old.
McNally wrote the first queer community I had ever wanted to join. The people he wrote were messy and complicated, sometimes cruel and often pathetic; they made terrible mistakes and hurt one another badly. Then, in the end, they came back together. They acknowledged and forgave one another, however quietly, however implicitly. They carried their shared history lightly, most of the time, until the time came to take it up and pass it on. I closed the book for the last time feeling the weight of that history, crying myself stupid — but so thankful to have found it, and to have been entrusted with a part of it.
There’s a scene at the end of the play, one last twist of the knife, where all these characters you’ve learned how to love tell you directly how they’re going to die. ‘Sooner than I thought,’ says one; another, the youngest of the group, tries to proclaim his immortality even as he admits to dying in a plane crash, on his way to a concert. One is left, inevitably, to bury all the others. You have to know, because it matters, because their lives matter — that’s what the play has been trying to tell you all along.
I don’t know how else to explain it. Of course this was how Terrence McNally died. Of course it would be this new plague, and the unconscionable complacency that came in its wake.
Rest in peace; rest in power. You were a real one. Thank you for what you gave me.
W