In all likelihood this was when we’d be walking into that big, empty, echoing school gym.
They led us out a side door and down a trail, a wooded and very pretty walkway with trees on either side. Then we stepped into a very large open area, a field really, and it took a moment to process what I was looking at. The hard, clean Nebraska sunlight was really bright and I put my hand to my eyes. It didn’t seem possible that the sight before me was real.
For a second, I just stopped.
There were people as far as the eye could see. Seated on the ground looking expectant.
And then as we came into view they went completely nuts — applauding, cheering, standing up, whistling, and shouting.
For us.
The noise was deafening, the emotion coming from them was overwhelming. It was like we were astronauts returned from a lunar landing.
I turned to Alison and said over the thunder, “What’s going on?”
“I tried to tell you,” she said.
From the stage, where we were headed, came the sounds of the Little House on the Prairie theme song. Beginning with those first four hopeful notes of the French horn and then the rest coming in — music filled with faith, energy, and optimism. I’ve never loved that theme song more.
People were shouting, “We love you!”
As I stepped onto the stage, I felt shaky and stunned. Then came a convulsion of tears. An absolute wall of emotion I didn’t know was inside me. After all these years…feeling so forgotten…like the work I’d done, we’d all done, hadn’t mattered to anyone…
I looked over at Karen Grassle and she was crying too. Alison was beaming at me with tears glittering in her eyes.
“They love you,” Alison said, giving my hand a squeeze.
And so as life has always done, it gave me something beautiful and good while at the same time handing me something unbearably difficult and sad.
Every few months of taking care of my beloved David, with his cartons of pills morning, noon and night, with the oxygen canisters and pain meds, was broken up with a visit with my new family — the fans.
The Little House fans, known affectionately as Bonnet Heads, gave those of us in the cast a gift — they let us know what the show had meant. And continued to mean.
As I said earlier, back in the ‘70s when we were filming the episodes we would sometimes see the Nielsen ratings — tiny numbers on a big spread sheet — but that didn’t give any indication about how people felt about the show, the impact it was having, or why they watched. Speaking for myself, at the time between staying on top of my lines and the schedule, along with running The Liquid Butterfly and my social life, I had no clue about what the show meant.
Now, by contrast, in too many cases to count I would meet women my age who today watched the show with their grandchildren — it was something that knitted their family generations together. I was meeting hundreds of men and women who came to me, many with tears in their eyes, who said, “I’m a teacher because of you.” That’s big. That’s so big. I still don’t know what to do with that except to feel such gratitude. If nothing else, I’m thankful that I was able to take the shame I felt as a girl about my grades in school and turn it into kindness and empathy in the role of Miss Beadle. Which in turn inspired others to want to become the teachers they had never had.
Just as pain and darkness can be a spiral, so too can hope and joy — a spiral motivating people to become their very best.
I felt at the fan events such an outpouring of love for the character and for the show; it seemed like fans wanted something more. Something they could hold on to and keep that somehow connected them to Miss Beadle and to Little House.
Back at home in my sewing room, I began eyeing some scraps of cloth and then I looked over at my pile of feed bags that I’d been recycling as re-suable shopping bags and thought, “Hmmmm.” The wheels began turning.
I started designing a bag, using squares of fabric — with a quilt-like approach — and when I’d finished I printed an image of Miss Beadle onto a cloth square and glued it on one side held in place with colorful trim. After I’d made and sold quite a few of these little creations, I dubbed them “Beadle Bags” and over time they’ve grown larger and more complex in design. This little bag project that I started as a creative outlet became popular. People who attended the Little House conventions bought them like crazy and I’ve always had trouble keeping up with demand. I keep track of proceeds as they come in as I set aside a healthy percentage to help support the Wellness Center and their work with those with cancer.
In 2009 I drove David the 40-minute trip north to St. Helena Hospital for a visit with his pain management physician. It was always a bit eerie going there as this was the hospital where my dad had died. And it was a reminder that he had passed out of this life in such an appalling way without any friends or family with him. Somebody to hold his hand. To say ‘I love you’ one last time.
David’s pain had continued to intensify, made worse by his physical deterioration, the result of being now almost entirely bedridden. What an awful downward cycle, one health issue feeding into another. David’s doctor said we had reached the limit of what he could legally prescribe and the next best step would be for us to get David into the local hospice program. Once approved for hospice, they’d have the ability to give him morphine, which would be the last frontier in terms of managing his pain.
This shook us both and understandably David was resistant to the idea. We all know what hospice means — it’s the start of the closing credits. The acknowledgment that you’re not going to get better. This bout of sickness, unlike every other throughout your life, will not end with one day getting out of bed and saying, “Whew, glad that’s over.” And off you go. And life continues.
Hospice means this is your final illness.
Ultimately, though, as much as he wanted to, it was impossible for David to hold out against the pain and we did get him signed up for hospice. And it was a good thing. They surgically implanted a pain pump in his right side below his ribs. It created a strange lump under his skin, which was the downside. The upside was that the device allowed him to self-administer morphine throughout the day. Now, mind you, it’s not like a free-flowing fountain. I had to manually re-activate it, using a remote control, several times a day so that he could give himself doses every few hours but still, it provided a level of pain relief that made him a lot more comfortable.
Besides the medication, hospice came with the help of some truly stellar people including the nurses who visited throughout the week along with the volunteers. One guy, who was one of my favorites — and David’s — would come a couple of times a week, bring his guitar, and he and David would talk, joke around, and even sing together. These folks were truly amazing.
A sad part of this level of pain medication was that more and more David was detached from the world around him. He rarely left the house and increasingly he seemed less interested in doing so.
To keep things as lively as possible I set up a television in our bedroom and together we started following the San Francisco Giants. When games came on, we wore team hats and sweatshirts as we ate together and cheered on our guys.
His ability to engage came and went but I did everything I could to bring the world to his bedside. David’s son Jason visited as often as possible as well as his sister Paula, making the trip from her home in San Diego. I tried to make sure he had visitors though his interest in socializing became less and less.
One year when his birthday was coming up I contacted all his old friends, all the people he’d worked with that I could find and asked them to send some memory of working with David along with photos, drawings, anything that would cheer him up. I got a huge response, lots of fun memories from old Pasadena Playhouse friends, crew who’d worked with him on Broadway and in Los Angeles. I collected all the materials into a huge, fat binder, created a nice cover, and gave it to him for his birthday. Another time I arranged for him to take a h
elicopter ride over Napa Valley with a friend of ours.
Nothing I could do though would make him better. It was all a matter of doing our best to manage the slow inevitable.
By early 2012 David’s color wasn’t good and I could tell something bad was going to happen. I asked the hospice nurse who came three times a week, “How will we know when he fails?”
“There will be signs,” she said, with what I can only guess was intentional vagueness.
In the first weeks of that year we had a quiet, personal celebration of our 20th anniversary and we laughed about bootlegging our wedding and about how we’d gotten engaged — he’d hidden my ring in a box of Cracker Jacks. At times like this I was able to take his hand and tell him things like, “I’m going to miss you so much.” He didn’t react a lot at that point but he indicated that he understood and that he loved me, that he had loved our life together.
We celebrated my birthday on February 27 and almost as a rare gift, his eyes looked good and he was able to sit up. My niece, Mary, brought over a special dinner for us and David ate — he actually had an appetite, which was unusual. I saw that infectious smile of his again, even if it looked a little weary. It was a rare moment of feeling like maybe things weren’t so bad.
On the afternoon of the following day something within him abruptly changed. David started to pant, hard, like a dog. The ins and outs coming quickly, like hearts beats, like the ticking of a stopwatch. I will never forget the look on his face, such panic and fear in his eyes as if to say “Is this it?”
I called the hospice nurse and she came over.
“What do I do?” I asked.
Nothing in my life — nothing — had prepared me for this moment.
She said with calm assurance that the thing to do was to increase his dose of morphine; it would relax him.
I now had liquid morphine in a small brown glass bottle, which I could administer with a dropper. Measuring out a small dose, I managed to get some through his chapped lips as he gasped hard for air.
I waited, hoping, praying, pleading silently for the panting to slow down, but nothing changed.
The nurse gathered her things to go, telling me to give him more as needed and reassuring me that it would help. With those instructions and nothing more — what was happening, what to expect — she was gone.
The panting went on and on and on. And on. I gave him more dribbles of liquid morphine but still there was no effect and I didn’t want to give him too much for fear I would overdose him.
I made a pot of coffee, preparing to stay up all night with him if that’s what it took. I remained there with my dear David as day turned to night, just focused on his breathing, the rapid, shallow intake and output of breath. For all his effort it was crushingly clear he wasn’t getting oxygen. He was working 100 times harder for almost nothing in return. I don’t remember what I said to him in those hours. I don’t remember if I held his hand or stroked his hair or whispered I love you, though I’m sure I must have done all of those things. Somehow my memories are just of darkness and panting and trying somehow to make him hold on. Reaching out with my mind, with every ounce of energy in my own body to hold him here. To keep him here. To make him stay.
At some point around 5 a.m., I went into the kitchen to refill my coffee mug and when I came back, everything was quiet. Quiet in a wrong, excessive way. I moved closer to David. He was unmoving. The panting had stopped. Everything had stopped.
His mouth hung open unmoving.
His chest unmoving.
His eyes staring.
Catastrophic silence.
In a state of shattering fear I ran to the phone and called a neighbor, Judy, who was a crisis nurse. She came right over with a stethoscope and put it to his chest and then his neck.
I knew her words before she spoke them.
“Charlotte, I’m so sorry,” she said. “He’s gone.”
More of that appalling silence.
I had the sickening sense that the floor was about to vanish. I was seconds away, moments away, from an emotional free fall that I must fight because what that crash looked like I didn’t want to know. I needed to keep moving.
I pushed tears from my eyes and went to work on the checklist of things that was already forming in my mind. First I called hospice and they sent over the night nurse. She arrived quickly and said, “I’ll take care of everything.”
She repeated the same procedure with the stethoscope that Judy had gone through and possibly more. I don’t know. I didn’t want to be in the bedroom any longer. The nurse came out and gently asked what I would like him to be wearing. I told her which zippered jacket and which pair of pants to put him in. She got busy and before I knew it someone from the funeral home had come to take the body.
The body.
Already it didn’t feel like David anymore.
That smile that had comforted me. Those arms that had made me feel safe. I was alone again. In a world without him.
The thought sent an arctic numbness through me that was unshakable.
There was so much to do.
I probably picked up the phone ten times before I was physically capable of making the two calls I knew I had to make — heartrending, gut-destroying phone calls to Jason, David and Lydia’s son, and to David’s sister Paula. Both were obliterated by the news. Both had hoped to see him one more time but the events of the past few hours had come so suddenly there’d been no time.
Paula just sobbed hopelessly and I said to her, “Paula, I need your help. I have to write an obituary and I need you to do it.”
I knew that at this moment she would need a job just as badly as I did. Something that would require her to focus and to pull her mind and soul into one piece. Do something for David.
Of course her first draft was 12 pages long. I loved her for that. How can you take a life like his and distill it down to 600 words? How can you begin to do it justice?
Jason was able to get to Napa that afternoon and he was a great help and comfort. Thank God because over the next few days there was so much to do. The following morning I realized there was an urgent errand that I needed to run and didn’t want to do it alone. Jason and I took David’s straw Panama hat to the mortuary where his body lay ready for the crematorium. I wasn’t sure if I’d made it in time or not. When we arrived I went to the woman at the front desk and suddenly words left me. Without realizing I’d been rehearsing my words once I got there. Oh hell, I’d just say what I needed to say.
“I know this is a strange request,” I said, my voice breaking, putting David’s hat on the reception counter. “But my husband is here, David Banks, and he never went anywhere without his hat.”
I couldn’t continue.
The woman asked, just to be certain, if he was being cremated and I nodded. It’s all I could do in response. She checked and there was still time for this last gesture.
It seemed like there were many moments like that, saying goodbye in a thousand small ways — getting rid of all the pills, cleaning out the room, giving away this or that memento to family members. Biggest of all though was that it became clear we needed not one but three memorial services, one in Napa, one in Los Angeles, and one in San Diego. I have wonderful memories of each. There was music, laughter, tears, and great, great memories. It was exactly what David would have wished for. And in fact I was so glad that to his dying breath he’d had that fat binder of stories and photos from all those friends and family members. He’d known how much, how widely, how deeply he was loved.
We scattered David’s ashes — most of them — in San Diego Bay. But I kept a small amount for one final spot — his spiritual home in New Orleans. A friend was flying there on business and I told him where to go and what to do.
He told me that he got to the corner of St. Peter and Royal, waited for a moment, and reverently let David’s remains spill to the street. And when he did so, he heard music. A moment later a brass band appeared from around the corner and marched right through
David’s ashes.
It happened right on cue.
Once a stage manager, always a stage manager.
And then I was home. And home was quiet. Home was David-less. I tried to do all the right things. For a time I went to a grief recovery group and learned that others like me suffered from atrocious guilt that they had overdosed their dying loved ones on morphine. I went to my alcohol recovery meetings and found comfort there too.
But there I was at home one night in the weeks after the memorials, after the friends and family had gone home, and I started crying.
And I couldn’t stop.
I cried so hard and for so long I thought I would injure myself. But the sadness inside of me was so big there was no way for it to escape. It didn’t want to seep out in teaspoons. This was the kind of sorrow that seemed to want to break out of me all at once like a tank through a chain link fence and if it did, it felt like it would physically tear me apart.
Finally after a few days of this, I didn’t know what else to do. I went to a neighbor’s house and said, through tears and hiccups, “I don’t know what to do. I can’t stop crying.”
They gave me tight, warm hugs and took me out to dinner. What else can you do?
Within the next couple of days I tried to talk myself into feeling better. I made valiant attempts to tap into my mother’s stoicism. I tried to come to terms with the raw hole, like a suppurating wound, in my world left by David’s absence.
At times like this, when the stress and bigness of tragedy is so overwhelming, I think that unknowingly we fall into the oldest habits within us, the ones etched into our deepest architecture.
I stopped by a drug store in Napa to pick up a few things for the house and I found myself staring at a display at the end of an aisle. This was a colorful, friendly arrangement of little wine bottles in four-packs. Just sitting there being bright and cheerful.
Didn’t I deserve a little brightness and cheerfulness? said an old voice inside me. Not my voice exactly but a voice that was familiar.
Little House in the Hollywood Hills Page 27