"Summerlove"
(originally written and delivered by Michael Louis Serafin-Wells for his sweetheart, Summer, at her memorial on April 25, 2011)
I have a thousand things to say
about Summer Lindsay Serafin. A thousand thousand. I’ll be saying them and
thinking them and writing them down every day for the rest of my life no matter
how brief or prolonged that may be. But today...Just for today...
She liked to sleep. That’s not what
I wanna talk about but it has to be said. She loved sleeping. I’m listening to
one her voicemails of late and she says she is so excited by the prospect of
sleep. That “it is like (her) mouth is watering for sleep”. She says that. It’s
good. I sometimes sleep now and just want to stay. I hope I might find her
there.
It’s impossible, really. Impossible
that I met her. That she “found me” she liked to say. I’m not from around here.
It’s impossible that she lived in a place called “The Inner Sunset”. Impossible
that she lit me up, this shining person, and held me, safely, in her orbit.
Impossible. All of it. And today. Just impossible.
She was a terrible driver. Even
Mike said so. I loved her battle-scared Blue Prius. The passenger side mirror
in a kaleidoscope thousand pieces, dangling by a cable. A taillight busted. The
bumper sagging. No, no she fixed that. The back seat full of boots and sunhats
and coconut water. And tissues. She left a trail of tissues everywhere. Like
Hansel & Gretel. You could follow it to its source and eventually find her.
She was – words, not for the first
time, fail – an unearthly beauty. An ethereal beauty. And shockingly, entirely
earthbound. Preternaturally present. She ate up life. With both tiny perfect
fists. Ate it up. Actually, she ate quite beautifully. Do you remember that?
Cutting and balancing petite bites, transferring them knife to fork with quiet
elegance. Even bananas she ate like that. Seriously, I have a picture. I got
her to try dark chocolate. She wasn’t a fan at first. She broke little bits off
into tiny pieces. I looked over and she was sprinkling Equal onto them one at a
time.
She was the dearest dearest girl.
Nothing phony about her. If you got to know her at all, your heart just broke
in two the moment you realized, the moment you saw her, really saw her and then
surged with love. For her. This amazing girl.
She didn’t do anything to make it
difficult, but I can understand how someone could think she was hard to get to
know. She was friendly but never facile. She wasn’t frivolous. She was serious.
She was fun, god, was she fun. She loved people – and this is what I wanna get
it, at long last – she loved people and she took them seriously. Not
everybody’s up for that. More fool they.
I’m circling the runway here, I
know, but there’s one more thing I gotta say before I bring it in – she was a
breathtakingly gifted actor. I met her doing Edna O’Brien’s Tir na nOg, Chris
Smith’s last play at The Magic. She played the central role, a country girl in
the west of Ireland who grows to young adulthood and further adventures in
Dublin. And she burned that stage to cinders every goddamn night. With three
broken toes. If you live here and you go to the theatre and you did not see her
in that, I don’t know what to tell you. I really don’t. A year later, right
after she was in Rock n Roll at ACT, she went down to Carmel to do David Hare’s
The Blue Room directed by Ken Kelleher. I sat there between Linda and Coy and I
just thought “god, what am I doing?” I have a perfectly healthy ego. I’m from
New York. But I have never seen acting like that. She is like the supermoon.
Once in a generation.
She loved her work. And she was
good at it. But she had a higher calling. To love. And, yes, that is what I
want to talk about. Because she told me. She told me she knew why she was here
and that was to love. She was filled with love. So much love. And she wanted
more than anything to share her love with others. She told me that. And there
is absolutely no doubting it because you could not have a better piece of luck
in this world than to have been blessed enough to have been loved by her. She
was like that device they use in open heart surgery that cracks your chest open
and holds it gaping, wide, so you can be healed. That fragile little muscle,
scarred and scared and on the verge of shutting down, giving out, giving up,
held now tenderly in her expert hands, beneath her loving, healing gaze.
Her love was tenacious, vigilant.
Unflinching. I met her three years ago and she quickly became the center of my
life. She didn’t drop people. If you were in, she was in. Even if you faltered
because nobody had ever shown up for you before like this, she was on you.
Checking in. Reminding. Different this time. Not goin’ anywhere. She hated
talking on the phone but we talked every day, often for hours. For three. She
knew everything about me. Things I never tell became hers.
And she made sure I knew her as
well. Her gratitude, her pride in a happy childhood. Loving, devoted,
would-take-a-bolt-of-lightning-for parents. Her epic struggle from the age of 5
to live. Ryan’s gifting her a kidney and the double organ transplant that saved
and changed her life. The unfathomable loss of Jesse. She carried every piece
of her past with pride and love and honesty into every room, knowing exactly
who she was, like no one I have ever known. Or ever will.
God, how I loved her! She’s right.
She did find me. I clung to her. “Like a liferaft” I told her she was, “to a
drowning man.” She smiled and said, “you’re not drowning anymore.”
When my mom died last year, I was
in London. I got the news in the middle of the night. I was alone. I called
Summer, eight hours behind, here. When I told her, she burst into tears. And
then told me to get on Skype. “I want to see you drink an entire glass of
water”, she said. “And lie down. And try to sleep. I’ll be right here at my
computer watching you. I will watch you while you sleep.” She watched over me
like an angel, a cyber angel, and when I woke she was there with Linda getting
me on a plane to New York and then on to Michigan. Then Summer flew herself to
Detroit and waited in the airport all night to meet my plane. And was at my
side every day for a week while I buried my mother. Who does that? Serafin
love. Irrepressible, irreplaceable girl.
“When I met you”, she said “you
were so wounded, so hurting, so sad – I just wanted to love you, to heal. But I
never dreamed”, she added, “I would ever get so much love in return.” Who does
that?
I need her. I am broken. That is as
it should be. It’s supposed to be hard. She cracked my chest open. It’ll have
to stay that way. Because who would go back? But it’s hard.
Summer, incredibly, had an answer
for that, I think. All this is preface. She’d want to have the last word. So,
I’d like to share that. It’s her Christmas card from a couple of years ago. She
was in Boston doing Rock n Roll at The Huntington. It closed just before the
holidays and she came to New York to exchange gifts with me. She made me
promise to wait until December 25th to open it. So, I took it on the plane with me,
waited til Christmas morning and opened it at my Mom’s. The gift was a
beautiful blue and grey scarf she knitted. There was also a card. It’s to me
but in a way it’s to us all. Everyone of us who she loved. Everyone of us who
love her. And feel so lost. Because life is so lonely, the world so empty and
wrong without her.
My Dearest Michael,
I’ve been working on this in the
green room and backstage since we came to Boston. I’d drape it around my neck
to keep warm while knitting in the dark of the freezing wings. The cast is
decisively in favor of the striped color combination.
It’s Christmas day, and I’m wearing
my pajamas. I’m in my P.J.’s even if you’re reading this when the sun has set.
Ryan is making another bourbon and coke even if you’re reading this as the sun
rises. My Dad is reading aloud shocking statistics about religion or politics,
my Mom is spraying perfume on the dog, and me...? I am missing you. Maybe one
day we’ll spend Christmas together.
Coy says “You are where you’re
meant to be”, and while I like that idea, I know, far too well, what it feels
like to be in a world where everything feels wrong – where everything is wrong.
You have also been to that place. And as the world spins on its own axis,
people are lost in their own needs and trials. We falter blindly, and strive
endlessly. But no matter where you are, whether you should be there or not, and
no matter who is present... know that you are a treasure in your own right. If
the chest is buried, the key is lost, or the map stolen, it doesn’t matter; it
doesn’t change the fact that it’s inside you. I just see what’s there. You
carry it with you. What’s hidden can always be found.
I love you.
Your Gingersnap,
Summer
I
love you, too. Love you forever. Goodnight, little sweetheart.
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