A Finished Heart is my solo, live performance of narrative, dialogue and poetry with a musical score. I introduce Chris, who, in 2007, is my husband of sixteen years. At the age of 56, he is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and has three months to live.

As I care for him,  Chris shares his experience of dying and we talk intimately about love, forgiveness, suffering, peace and meaning. The culmination of our life together is that I could help Chris die and he could guide and comfort me. How would this time unfold?

Dying is our teacher and we learn from each other. We find our deepest meaning by bringing all emotions and intuition into experience without judgment.

​Our world is filled with questions. Answers change; some are not forthcoming and we wonder: can they exist? Control seems irrelevant and this increases my compassion for self and others.

Our dialogues express what we taught each other, how we changed during this time and our love. These are days of great passion, infused with our characteristic humor.

Our words explore the relationship between how we thought about dying in the past and what would actually transpire; and my journal reveals how this loss, profound beyond words, has altered my relationship with the world.

Chris had a great sense of play. Here he is, extracting something from under a rock! A Finished Heart brings audiences to gentle laughter, just as it may bring tears that express the joys of love and the pangs of great sorrow.  "To be able to laugh in the face of dire circumstances is a gift," wrote actor and director, Wil Kilroy, after he brought the show to University of Southern Maine, "and you provided that for us amidst eloquent poetry, beautiful music and pithy dialogue."

I believe that A Finished Heart embodies the beautiful Portuguese sentiment of Saudade, inasmuch as it has been described (as closely as possible in English) as "the presence of the absence." For me, grief is not "the price we pay for love," but love itself.

The sun retires. Chris' favorite place to jog says, "goodbye."

Here is a window through
which you will feel the force that compelled us to mate, will feel the breeze that must speak a story forever, ​the way a wind ​must always cause branches to sing.