I lost a 39-year old friend to colon cancer this weekend. He was an extraordinary man, who for two years fought stage-four colon cancer with wit and pluck and determination. I am still in shock about losing him, his attitude was so positive and his outlook so steady on complete recovery, it is hard to believe (even given the tremendous odds he was facing) that he could be gone.
One of my improv buddies from my earliest classes out at Wit in DC, I met Shawn "Felt" Felty shortly after experiencing several family traumas in a matter of a few short years, as well as 9/11 (and all that came with living within a mile of the Pentagon). Everything felt topsy-turvy---the world that I thought I understood was not clear anymore---but going to improv classes and getting a chance to just play and to explore and be emotional and be silly and just be in the present was exactly what I needed to put myself right again.
When my work friends and I decided to start participating in the 48-Hour Film Project and we needed actors, I immediately contacted my two favorite guys from class, Shawn and Stuart, and not surprisingly, they became the featured characters in our first movie attempt. After I moved to Chicago with Mike for graduate school, Shawn continued to make these annual films, and as experience shaped the films into better and better final products, Shawn starred in one, "Screening Process," that went on to win awards. I smile every time I watch it, as it details the misadventures in dating of Felt's character, and in real life, Shawn was always armed with a new and interesting dating story, tales that we "old marrieds" enjoyed immensely.
Felt simply attacked life and got the most out of it. He loved his alma mater, University of Pittsburgh, with intensity, and was their number one sports fan. He attended more Pitt games than you could imagine, and proudly played on the Pitt alumni softball team in DC. A longtime sufferer of Crohn's disease, Shawn worked hard to stay fit and healthy. Even after his cancer diagnosis and while on chemo, he trained for a 5K, and completed more than one. When the doctors told him that there was nothing more that they could do for him except keep him comfortable, he wasn't phased, and when a doctor from his tumor panel at Johns Hopkins suggested a new kind of liver surgery to help remove tumors that had spread there, he went for it. When the opportunity came to share his story in the 2010 Colondar, a calendar featuring the stories (and scars) of colon cancer survivors, he became Mr. May.
One of the first precepts you learn in improv is this idea of "Yes, and..."---that when someone suggests something on stage, go with it, don't negate or dismiss it, because all the fun and adventure in a scene is on the other side of the "Yes." Being far away from Shawn while he was sick, relying only on his amazing blog, his Facebook status, and his emails for updates, it was easy for me to believe that he was absolutely going to be healthy in the end, as he faced cancer with a "Yes, and..." approach. Yes, he was more emotional, crying at things all the time, but he felt like he was learning from the experience. Yes, he was going through sometimes awful procedures and even more awful side effects, but he was still playing softball. Yes, the prognosis was bleak, but he was just going to take it one day after the other, and end up well. It just feels inconceivable that this journey ended the way that it did.
A few weeks ago, Felt let us know that he was getting a catheter inserted in his lung to help drain fluid, as his lungs had been filling often, and repeated trips to drain them at the hospital were becoming cumbersome. This was to be an outpatient procedure. Emails from him stopped after he went in, and I became worried. As it turns out, he was in and out of the hospital from that point on, and it was this inability to breath that became his final struggle.
Now, I feel all topsy-turvy again. I can understand a lot of things, but this...this is one for which I just can't make one bit of sense. I wish I could have been there to see him again, and I wish that I could go to his memorial, but since wishing can't make those things so, I'm posting here, and sharing his life a little more with my circle, so that his infectious zest for life can spark the same in even more people. I am so grateful---grateful beyond all words---that years ago, I thought to ask him to be in our films, and that he thought it would fun to do so. Knowing that there is a treasure-trove of movies that we can turn on to hear, see, and remember Felt makes this awful loss just a tiny bit more bearable.
