JOAN

 
Joan, another of the loves of my life, and me, in someone else's home. We lived together in Santa Monica for several years in the 1980s. I was a regular on the TV show "Berrenger's" when we met and she worked for a small film studio. Her mother was Brazilian, a poor teenager when she met Joan's father, a French Canadian seaman, who brought her to the USA and was mostly gone. Joan had a tough childhood and adolescence unlike anyone I ever knew, but she transcended the tragic through her own unique magic and was so easy to live with (which I think this photo inadvertently reveals in the casual ways her left hand rests on my shoulder and my right around her waist).

I had been raising my children mostly as a single parent for most of my adult life and they were teens when Joan and I got together. Joan never tried to be a stepmother but instead just a friend to them and declared she never wanted children of her own. But after a few years changed her mind. I resisted that idea and we eventually separated and she met and married a really decent kind guy and immediately got pregnant. Then found out she had an incurable cancer.

She passed when her child was still an infant, her life ending tragically, as it had started. But in between, she lived life on her terms and achieved almost all she had set out to, a happy warrior for love's transcendent power.

(C) 2021 Michael Lally