I wasn’t sure how to do this. I’m not, as most of you know, a pithy person. So it seemed like a possibly dangerous invitation when the funeral director said, “You can have the room as long as you like.” How am I supposed to distill a life like Roger’s into a couple of benign paragraphs, a few clever anecdotes? That’s for a cocktail party, not for here. How am I supposed to tell the story of how we met—one of the great love stories, I think—when so many of you have already heard it? More than once….
Borrowing money from my parents to see Nicholas Nickleby. Watching Roger in three plays in twenty-four hours, two of them on television, then rewinding and watching them again and again. The ignored (and later recovered) note inviting him to see me perform at a theater benefit. The introduction behind the Winter Garden Theatre. The first date, talking all night, until he had to catch a plane in the morning. The truckloads of letters, the phone calls, the “business trips” to London just to be close to him for one little day. The ferocious, burning desire to be with this man that made me chase him literally around the world. And how I’d do it all again in a second for one more day or one more night.
But I’m not gonna tell that story. I think if Roger has to sit through that story again, he’ll rise right up and walk out of the room. And we can’t very well have that.
We can, however, have some Shakespeare. Roger asked for this to be read; he read it twenty-six years ago when his brother, Andy, died at the age of forty-one. I was there, and it was exquisitely painful and beautiful as Roger spoke it. It’s from act 4 of Cymbeline, but I won’t describe the plot to you, because nobody’s ever been able to describe the plot to Cymbeline. They are about to perform it in the park next week, so if you go—when you hear this, think of Roger. And try to hear Roger Rees speaking this now:
Fear no more the heat o’ the sun;
Nor the furious winter’s rages,
Thou thy worldly task hast done—
Home art gone, and taken thy wages;
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney sweepers come to dust.
Think and we will hear thee.
Nothing ill come near thee!
Quiet consummation have;
And renowned be thy grave!
But no one wants a funeral that is merely sad. Especially this one.
So here’s some backstory about Roger you may not know, and which might work as a leavening agent.
Roger first became acquainted with William Shakespeare when he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company as a spear-carrier. He and his friend Ben Kingsley joined together. It was 1967.
The first production they were in was The Taming of the Shrew. They played silent, nonspeaking huntsmen. And they were good. They were so good, they went on to play silent, nonspeaking huntsmen in nearly every Shakespeare play. Both Ben and Roger eventually got to play Hamlet for the company, but those early days were spent learning their craft and carrying spears, shields, and Dame Peggy Ashcroft around the stage.
Ben, of course, went on to win an Oscar and to be knighted by the Queen of England. About seven years ago now, Roger could be seen playing a surgeon on Grey’s Anatomy. In a three-episode arc.
I blame myself. Because Roger moved to America for me. But on behalf of the hundreds of friends in this room, aren’t we glad he did?
My friend Nancy Coyne suggested that I make this eulogy the final Roger Report. The last in the series of updates I sent around over the past few days that most of you have gotten. That seemed like a great idea, until I realized I need to do one more Roger Report, with some information I’ll try to send out later today or tomorrow.
Then my friend Tom Schumacher came by and said something to cheer me up—and it struck me as a great closing line. Now, opening lines are very important. They have to gather the audience close, make them put aside their workaday world, and start them listening. But closing lines must be definitive, provocative, memorable. Here’s one, for example: My extraordinary husband is gone.
Look at that sentence. First of all, to be able to use the word husband, and not mean it euphemistically. To have lived long enough for that to be the case, when for twenty-nine of our thirty-three years together, there were many words for what Roger and I were to each other, but no one word that stood for all. Roger so loved it, when four years ago, we finally had a word for what we are. We high-fived two weeks ago when the Supreme Court decision was handed down. It was Friday, June 26—four years to the day that Roger proposed to me.
And then the phrase extraordinary husband. How incredibly blessed we are, Roger and I, to have found an extraordinary husband in each other.
How easy it would have been for us never to have met, never to have wooed, never to have won each other. How ordinary my life would otherwise have been without my extraordinary husband.
It’s easy for me to tell you how extraordinary Roger is. Extraordinarily kind, extraordinarily talented, extraordinarily achieved…extraordinarily thoughtful, extraordinarily gentle, extraordinarily curious…extraordinarily patient, extraordinarily sentimental, extraordinarily affectionate.
This morning Trevor Nunn wrote me: “Roger was inspirational. I think of that iconic poster for Nicholas Nickleby and there he is, punching the air, and it’s a thrilling image of determination, defiance, optimism, good fighting evil, and dauntless courage. Every one of those ingredients is in Nicholas, but every one of them is also in Roger, onstage, offstage, everywhere he went, with everyone he met. Which gave him the aura of rare, generous-spirited, extraordinary humanity.” Well, that’s Roger.
It takes no time at all to tell you about how extraordinary I am. Quite simply, I’m extraordinarily lucky to be the man Roger Rees fell in love with. He is my teacher, my mentor, my friend, my champion. The man without whose love, my life would be, as Trevor said, a lesser, smaller, darker thing.
For all these years, every time I sit next to Roger, I’m breathless. Our marriage is like the plot of the best play I could ever conceive.
I must admit, before I met Roger—that’s to say, before I was twenty-five years old—I didn’t know much about love. I had yet to find it, yet to capture it for myself. And I’d had many moments in my life where I’d told myself love wasn’t real, or wasn’t going to happen to me because I’m gay, or that love fades away after some initial wild spark.
I talked for a couple of hours with Cantor Garfein on Saturday. Roger had just died. I felt dead inside. But I started talking about Roger and I could hear myself come alive.
With every nuance and fragment and twist and turn I could recall of my years with Rog, I felt in my posture, I heard in my voice, what real live love looks and sounds like. All-consuming, tender, passionate, ridiculous, intimate, and so very, very deep. And yes, extraordinary.
Being with Roger every day these last nine months—months that were monstrously challenging for him and me—I’ve seen how hard he fights and how hard I’ve fought for him—and with him. Every day and night with him. I’ve seen how interwoven the two of us truly are. I’ve seen how much more we loved each other than even I appreciated before the disease came into our lives.
But that’s nothing compared to the past two days. Seeing the overwhelming outpouring of love and heartbreak from literally thousands of people all over the world, and in the course of just one weekend—people who knew Roger well and others who admired him from afar—makes me realize that our love story is one for the ages. Inspiring and never-ending and larger than anything I could ever have imagined until now.
My extraordinary husband is gone.
Which, on this July afternoon, makes perfect sense of his favorite sonnet:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate;
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d,
And every fair from fair sometime declines—
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.