EULOGY FOR TONY MONTANARO
Editor’s Note: Tony Montanaro, the artistic director of Celebration Barn
( www.mimetheatre.com
) in South
Paris, Maine, died on December 13, 2002. Mr. Montanaro was an actor and a
mime who studied with Marcel Marceau and Etienne Decroux. In 1972, Mr.
Montanaro moved to South Paris and started the Montanaro Mime Theatre
School. Most recently, Mr Montanaro toured, taught, and performed with his
wife, ballet dancer Karen Hurll Montanaro. Those of us who were lucky enough to see Mr. Montanaro’s sparkling
performances will never forget the exhilaration and the joy we felt as
we watched him. Karen Hurll Montanaro, gave the following eulogy
at Mr. Montanaro’s memorial service on January 31, 2003 at the State Street
Church in Portland, Maine.
TONY’S MEMORIAL
January 31, 2003
On December 13, around 11:00 AM, Tony’s breathing became erratic. The
hospice nurse had prepared me for that, and I told everybody, “Oh, that’s
called apnea. After this comes a rattling sound.” That’s what I said, but
what I meant was, “Oh no, he’s not dying yet.” Tony’s son, Adam, was holding
Tony’s hand. I put my hand on Tony’s shoulder and called his name. Nothing
happened—no breath, no rattle, nothing. Now I don’t know if this is true or
not, but I had the distinct impression that if I said his name just a bit
louder or just a bit more urgently, this might bring him back for another
breath. And at that moment, I made the conscious decision to keep quiet. I
didn’t want to call him back. I didn’t want to remind him of this body, this
reality. So I let him go, and it was not sad. It was not about me; it was
about Tony and it was fine!
I felt that everything stopped just then, there was no breath, no time, no
thoughts, nothing. Adam and I looked at each other and for a long time.
Then the wheels started turning, and the tears came. They were weird and
noisy. But as soon as I made that first desperate sound, something wonderful
happened. I felt Tony’s big, beautiful family close in on me as if
magnetized to my body. They pressed into me with all their weight, and I
felt their hands sinking into my muscles. And while we locked into this
position, Tony (as he would say) “took the hell off.”
The Oxford English dictionary defines black hole as “a region within which
the gravitational pull is so strong that no form of matter or radiation can
escape from it except by quantum-mechanical tunneling, and thought to result
from the collapse of a massive star.”
Tony was a massive star in our lives. And when this star apparently
collapsed, many of us were sucked into a black hole and I, for one, didn’t
think I’d ever get out. But as the definition indicates, there is a way out:
“quantum mechanical tunneling.” And I think Tony would want me to tell you
about some of the tunnels I’ve found in the past few weeks.
Of all the roles that Tony played in my life, I think I grieved the most
about losing my teacher. And since many of us in this room are students of
Tony’s, I thought I’d focus on Tony-the-teacher. Incidentally, you didn’t
have to take a workshop with Tony to be taught by him. He taught wherever
he went, just by being himself. He taught Pam, his second wife, how to
meditate. He taught Marge, our agent, how to answer the phone. He taught
people how to walk on ice without slipping. He even taught our plumber in
Portland how to fix the toilet. And he loved calling David or Craig (his
spiritual brothers) with his latest insight into how they should approach
their lives and work.
I’d like to focus on Tony-the-teacher for another reason, too. During his
life Tony taught us certain things that would, if we applied them now, show
us where and how to find him alive and well.
Tony taught us how to solve problems—all kinds of problems—and his first
lesson was, “You can’t fix a leak under the sink while you’re in the living
room.” You have to go TO the problem—put your nose right up against it
before you can ever know what to do next.
So I took this lesson to heart and confronted my grief, my problem. I really
put my nose right up against it and found that the grief intensified every
time I heard a story about Tony. The Tony in these stories was so real, so
honest and unpredictable, I found myself craving more. I found myself
hungering and thirsting after something I couldn’t have. And because of
this, I began to feel less and less complete. The more delightful the story
about Tony, the worse I felt about myself. And suddenly I found many reasons
to put myself down. Regrets. Guilt. The whole works. But mainly, I kicked
myself for not measuring up to Tony somehow.
Then I remembered another one of his lessons. He said that once you have
your nose right up against the problem, something will occur to you and
you’ll know what to do next. He called these things, “occurrences.” Well, he
was right, something did occur to me. I found a love letter that Tony wrote
to me in the early days of our courtship. The night he wrote this, I had
just accepted his invitation to go to Sweden with him. He was exaggeratedly
happy about this, but on his way home that night, he drove past the site of
a fatal motorcycle accident. Here’s an excerpt from the letter he wrote to
me when he got home:
“I stand so humbly—so small against the
immensity of love, of death,
So insignificant before the passions of this world
the closer I get to perfection and real
beauty and real love and real godliness
and death, the more I feel like a lost child sobbing for its mother in the
fairgrounds.
O the immensity of loving!!”
I was so comforted by this. First, I was amazed to think that Tony, this
massive star, had ever felt insignificant, but it comforted me to know that
he felt this way—he knew exactly how I felt. And concurrent with Tony’s
feeling of insignificance, he remembered a black hole from his life, too. He
remembered losing his mother at the fair. But when he wrote this letter, he
was not feeling lost and small and alone because he missed his mother but
because he found himself right up against the immensity of love.
It makes sense; we’re not in despair because we miss Tony but because we
love him. We don’t feel small next to Tony but next to Our Love for him.
When someone dies, I think it’s quite normal for our love for that person to
expand and broaden and rise to the point of no return. And we will certainly
feel small next to the “immensity of this loving,” but that’s a good thing.
And it’s natural. It is the nature of love to lead us right up to that
excruciating realization of our smallness and at the same time, offer us a
way to give it all up. Give up that old, stupid sense of being a nobody and
step right into the Love that makes us Somebody.
I think this is why Tony was such a great teacher. He forgot himself when he
taught. He didn’t try to be a good teacher; he was too busy teaching. He
also never talked about loving his students, and I don’t think he thought
about loving us—maybe that’s because love doesn’t have to think about
itself—but he watched us more closely than many of us had ever been watched
before. He suspended his own opinions and judgments to SEE what was really
going on.
Tony taught us to look for “what’s given” and that’s what he did. He looked
for what each student had to offer, and he always found something to bring
out and develop.
Bob Stromberg told the Maine Sunday Telegram: “What Tony was brilliant at
was helping people find themselves on stage and giving them confidence to
proceed. People came out of Tony’s workshops feeling really encouraged. They
said, ‘I did something that was uniquely me, and people liked it.’”
If Tony did have an advantage over us—if he was, in some way, “better” than
we are—it is in this one thing: he saw us better than we saw ourselves, and
he believed in us more than we believed in ourselves. He believed in us so
much, he attacked anything that might stand in our way. Bad moods, excuses,
laziness, indifference, pettiness, self-deprecation. He attacked these
things, not to put us down, but to build us up. He showed us what we could
do, and we liked what we saw. And from then on, we would follow him
anywhere.
Tony’s star has not collapsed. It’s rising higher and brighter than ever,
and it’s forcing us to rise with it. If the great lessons of this life are
about self-discovery and love, then we can’t possibly lose our Teacher or
the Inspiration that informed him or the Love that kept us coming back for
more.
So if you find yourself in a black hole called “the absence of Tony,” just
move into that hole. Put your nose right up against it and something WILL
occur to you. Those “quantum mechanical tunnels” WILL open. The tunnels of
curiosity, honesty, solitude lead right back to our Teacher and Tony is
there—here and everywhere—just as commanding, real, and unpredictable as he
ever was.
Lovingly,
Karen Hurll Montanaro
