Tim: A Memoir About Healing Grief and Loss — and Hope
by Debbie L. Miller
I met Tim in class at an improvisational acting retreat in the l ate 1990s. was a stocky guy, with a rubber-mask face that could only be described as Howdy Doody-like, and Bassett Hound eyes that made him look a little sad. A few days into the workshop, a classmate had confided in me that while Tim seemed nice, she just couldn’t “get past that clown face.”
I didn’t think any more about it, though, as I reflected on what had brought me to this old Catskills resort. A few years earlier, my two beloved eighteen-year-old cats — my children — had died, my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and my father died of Alzheimer’s. Soon after that, my mother died, I found a suspicious lump that required surgery, and my husband of 23 years moved out.
I was 46 and life was kicking my sorry ass.
Without a role — no longer a wife, a daughter, not even a “mother to cats” — I was firmly entrenched in a cycle of peri-menopausal grief, trying to adapt to living alone and being an orphan.
Looking for an escape from my pain and some answers, I’d signed up for a week-long improvisational acting camp held at an Upstate New York resort well beyond its glory days. (Think Kellerman’s from Dirty Dancing.)
