Barry’s Bay – It’s not possible to grow up Irish-Catholic in the Ottawa Valley and not have a few belly-laughs at local wakes and funerals, if not shed a few tears at local weddings and baptisms. Yet, the older we get, increasingly it becomes harder to laugh at death.

In the past year, two of my closest childhood friends passed away – Susie Serran, less than a year ago and, only a few days ago, Cathy Chapeskie. Their deaths seemed impossible, given such talented, indomitable women, if only because to me they will always remain my teenage friends.

And though everyone has heard that only the good die young, even when we were rambunctious 16-year-old teenagers, we never really thought of ourselves as either good nor young. We always thought we were sinning ‘old souls’ in love with the artistry of live drama, both fictional and real.

We had so much fun getting into so much trouble growing up in Barry’s Bay during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The best of those times happened when we were students at Madawaska Valley District High School and we were shanghaied into working on a play written by Edward Bond, entitled Passion. It was this avant-garde mess, memorable for its pig’s head hanging off a cross, cumbersome baroque costumes and a script full of nonsensical anachronisms. It starred Cathy Chapeskie, Susie Serran, Julie Kitts, Aloysius Glofcheskie, Gerard Rumleskie and Tim Conway, among others. I was charged with producing the complicated soundtrack that aired throughout the production.

Still, our Passion turned out beyond our wildest dreams. We ended up competing at the Ontario Drama Festival in Waterloo, after having won top honours at the Eastern Ontario Drama Festival in Ottawa. Eventually, it sparked Susie Serran to go on to a remarkable career, becoming, before she turned 30, the artistic director for the much-heralded Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto.

Cathy Chapeskie would study drama at York University, where she astounded her professors with her talent, and so was offered an all-expense paid trip to New York to read for the producers of a new TV spin-off of the Mary Tyler Moore Show, then in development called Rhoda. The producers told her profs she was a shoe-in to play Rhoda’s sidekick. If you knew Cathy’s acting chops, you knew that artistic appraisal was very much an understatement.

Instead, Cathy told me she sat for hours in a Toronto airport lounge where she ultimately decided, for very good reasons, not to board that flight to New York. Years later, she found her true calling as a much-loved grade-school teacher at Sherwood Public School in Barry’s Bay, only a stone’s throw from where she had grown up in her parent’s home just up the hill.

Susie and I rarely spoke after she hit the big time, but Cathy and I happily reconnected when I retired to Barry’s Bay. I cajoled her into joining the Opeongo Readers’ Theatre where she quickly became one of its stand-out performers on The Opeongo Line, a podcast I produce with local volunteers and no budget, but all of us with a deep love of live drama, both fictional and real.

The last time I spoke with Susie a few years ago, I tried cajoling her as well into joining our happy, rag-taggle podcast crew. Gracefully, she declined, but we shared some belly-laughs about a dinner we once merrily had near Toronto with another grade-school friend, Danny Kelly.

Meanwhile, after her own retirement, Cathy moved to Dawson City, Yukon to be closer to some of her children and yet, she would often visit her younger brother, Henry, a doctor in London, Ontario. And Henry, being a chip off the old block, occasionally flew Cathy up to Barry’s Bay in his unique airplane, modelled after his father’s, Dr. Andrew Chapeskie’s, similar design, and that had been famously featured in one of Fletcher Markle’s Telescope, a popular documentary TV series aired on the CBC in the 1960s.

So, a few summers ago, Cathy unexpectedly rings the doorbell at my home on Mask Island, after Henry landed his plane with her in Barry’s Bay. It was to be our very last face-to-face meeting, though we continued to email each other nearly every month, working out scripts for her to read on The Opeongo Line podcast.

Often in those emails, she would talk about her wild adventures flying between the Yukon and New Zealand, where another of her daughters lived with more of Cathy’s grandchildren. It always struck me as both appropriate, yet inconceivable, that my forever-16-year-old friend was a grandmother.

That morning, when we met face-to-face for the last time, Cathy and I sat in colourful Muskoka chairs on a waterfront patio, under a brilliant, blue sky, with a soft, warm breeze, coming in off the lake and sweeping over Mask Island. For three or four hours, we luxuriated in our childhood memories, starting with our most giddy, the time we had tried riding her father’s horse he kept on Mask Island. As ten-year olds, we somehow managed individually to get up into the saddle, but always facing the wrong way, repeatedly watching the horse’s tail swish in concert with our growing frustration, until we just threw in the towel and went searching for Indigenous artifacts.

That last summer morning, we talked mostly of Passion and those precious few cast members – Susie, Julie, Al, Gerard and Tim – that neither of us saw much of anymore, face-to-face. Still, we talked as though we had just met them uptown that very morning. I couldn’t tell you exactly what was said. All I remember is Cathy never looked or sounded better. Or seemed more healthy.

I wanted that conversation to go on forever. It was just fun to relive our misspent youth. It was a life we shared coming of age in Barry’s Bay. And we both knew, whatever had become of those lives, successfully climbing some imagined Everest or occasionally finding ourselves shipwrecked like Crusoe, we could always share that unique and sacred time of growing up, remembered only by a limited number of cherished souls, our handful of old Barry’s Bay friends.

We still very much had each other to prompt and embellish those memories, especially those involving that wonderfully rambunctious cast of six Passion characters, forever in search of a life elsewhere, and like ourselves, often too busy to enjoy the true beauty of lives once lived as high school students, or those wild, unexpected lives, all very much still ahead of us back then.

But, of those six cast members – Cathy, Susie, Julie, Al, Gerand and Tim – so talented and so much loved for their boundless talent just to be themselves, two no more will walk this earth. And it’s only a matter of time before the rest of us move on across the horizon as well.

So, how does one handle this remorseless Grim Reaper who’s bound to call eventually on each one of us, with not a care nor concern in the world for all the pain and suffering it causes those left behind as with each new horrible day it comes to collect another one of us?

Perhaps Cathy Chapeskie had the best answer I’ve ever heard. Whenever she was surprised by unexpected misfortunes in her life, whether a kid sitting backwards on a horse, or a brilliant young actress booting a line a third time in rehearsal, or even as a university drama student deciding there were more important things in life than fame or fortune in New York, she’d simply say with this huge, inimitable, always somewhat anxious smile, “Lord, love a duck!”

It was her own unique way of flipping off the bird, as much as any Catholic school girl from the 1960s ever would, at least back then. It was her way of telling the world that, for all of the bad things that do befall us in our terrible-beautiful lives, we are best to tell Misfortune, if not the Grim Reaper, to just go stuff itself.

To Cathy Chapeskie, at the very least, the memory of all our past happiness among our friends, and the hope of more happiness to come, could and would always triumph. And well, it should.