The next day or two were taken up with business: trips to the attorney, calls to insurance agents, dealing with the bank. I had a more personal task as well, writing Tommy’s obituary. The funeral home had offered to do it but I wasn’t going to let anyone else try to summarize this wonderfully complex man so I sat down and this is what I came up with.

Tommy, as he was known to everyone but the IRS and various lawyers, lost his courageous battle with severe and sudden onset cardiac disease on Saturday, April 28th 2018 at the age of 53. Up until his recent illness, he had continued to function in his myriad of roles as a fixture of the Birmingham performing arts scene including being the Company Manger of Opera Birmingham; wig, hair and make-up designer for Red Mountain Theatre Company; Children’s Choir director for the Unitarian Universalist Church of Birmingham; and running his own private studio in voice, piano and hair and makeup design. Tommy was born April 10th 1965 in Birmingham to Louie Tommy Thompson Sr. and Melvinia Dye Thompson. From a young age, he was captivated by music, making his operatic debut as the boy shepherd in Tosca at the age of 10 and singing for years with the Birmingham Boys Choir. In his teens, he was a member of the Summerfest ensemble and attended the University of Alabama Birmingham on, of all things, a track scholarship, where he majored in music, playing the flute in the Million Dollar Band and the oboe in the symphonic ensembles. After leaving UA, he showed his knack of picking up and mastering a wide variety of skill sets whenever something happened to pique his interest. He worked as a research assistant in linguistics. He obtained a culinary degree and worked as a professional chef and baker for such disparate employers as Continental Bakery, the Hilton, the Sheraton and Ralph and Kacoos. He even for a time helped run his own family restaurant. He enjoyed cooking, especially for other people, for the rest of his life and his cast parties and holiday open houses are legendary. When he got tired of restaurant hours, he went back to school and obtained his RN. His experiences in the early days of the HIV epidemic in Birmingham where he was helpful in the creation of such organizations as Birmingham AIDS Outreach and AIDS Alabama had wakened a life long need to help people in times of health crisis. After a stint as a pediatric nurse, he joined the staff of what was to become Birmingham Health Care, rising through the ranks to Chief Nursing Officer by the time he left the organization in 2005. Once again, it was time for self-reinvention and he returned to college in his 40s where he earned double degrees in music education and speech pathology from the University of Montevallo proving that it was indeed possible to teach this old dog a new trick or two. For the rest of his life, he took all of his inquisitiveness, his managerial skill, and his sheer love of the job well done to help better the condition of the performing arts in Birmingham. He spent countless hours in rehearsals, sang for many seasons with both the Opera Birmingham and the Alabama Symphony Orchestra choruses, stage managed, produced, performed in musicals, cabaret, and even the occasional play, and everywhere he went, encouraged his fellow performers and technicians to always improve their craft. Along the way, he picked up new skills in hair and makeup, helping give a more professional look to such shows as Annie Get Your Gun at Virginia Samford Theater, and The Little Mermaid and The Color Purple at Red Mountain Theatre Company. He even helped a few friends unleash their inner drag queen. He is survived by his husband and partner in musical/theatrical crime, Andrew Duxbury; his parents, Louie and Melvinia Thompson, his brother Pat Alan Thompson and wife Robbi, nieces Brooke Thompson Hedrick (Daniel) and Ashley Thompson Hubbard (Jeffrey), aunts, uncles, cousins, great nieces and nephews, and his huge extended Bohemian Birmingham family for whom he was a fixture both off stage and on. There will be a memorial service celebrating his life under the auspices of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Birmingham at a date to be announced later. In lieu of flowers, memorials can be made to either the Unitarian Universalist Church of Birmingham’s Children’s Music program or to Opera Birmingham. The best way to celebrate his legacy, however, is by teaching your children to sing.

It could have been twice as long, of course, but the Birmingham News are not overly generous with their column inches. (They must be making most of their profit off the obituary page these days). I finished this up, packed a suitcase, locked up the house, and headed for the beach for a few days to just stare at the waves and try not to think too much.

The 29th was a Sunday. I could not make myself get up and go to church and face a zillion in person condolences. Besides which, it was the Sunday our church was to first meet our new settled ministerial candidate and I didn’t want anything to distract from that process. Tommy wouldn’t have wanted that either. We had scheduled the family viewing for later that day. In the meantime, word was out and Facebook, email and all the rest were blowing up so I had to get something out to the world. I wrote this as a general message.

I am absolutely overwhelmed with all of the messages, phone calls, texts and other expressions of love and gratitude for my and Tommy’s moving through all of your lives over the years. You don’t think about it. You just live your life and you worry about the bills and whether you should have taken on that project and who picked up the dry cleaning and whether the cats have fresh water and before you know it, the years roll by and you find yourselves deeper and deeper embedded into a community. You have no time or inclination to really consider your particular thread in the tapestry until disaster strikes and your world is upended. All of a sudden all of the sureties and constants are missing and you’re left trying to calculate molar weights with an Avogadro’s number that is no longer fixed.

Five weeks ago, Tommy and I were in the midst of our normal chaotic existence. Romeo et Juliette was in production. I was on stage and he was doing his usual plethora of jobs including hair/make-up, running the box office and production management. The day after the show closed, he was fatigued, not unusual following a show weekend and spent the day resting. He felt even worse the following day and was beginning to have some severe lower extremity swelling. On the third day, he headed for the Emergency Department where they admitted him to the cardiologists who told us that basically the pumping mechanism of his heart had suddenly failed due to previously undiagnosed coronary artery disease. He had never had any chest pain, angina or other typical heart symptoms, only the asthma which he had suffered from for years and which, in hindsight, had masked his heart issues. His condition was so severe that the cardiologists argued among themselves for a week as to what they could do. Most felt there was nothing to be done. One felt that a risky course of cardiac stents and cardiac rest via some external pumps might get him out of the hospital. Ever positive, Tommy chose the latter and underwent an eleven hour stenting procedure and several weeks tied to bed by external pumps. The pumps were eventually removed in preparation for his being able to be rehabbed and sent home but last night, our luck ran out and he unexpectedly and suddenly died. It’s not absolutely clear why, but I suspect a pulmonary embolism from a combination of all the indwelling hardware and sluggish blood flow from a weak heart. It’s nobody’s fault. It just happened.

Those of you who have known me a long time know that this isn’t my first time at this particular rodeo. My first husband, Steve, died in 2001 after twelve years together, of terminal pulmonary disease. Tommy and I met in late 2002, got serious in the summer 2003 and by 2004 everyone assumed we’d been together for decades because we were the right complimentary fits for each other. We had fifteen good years. A lot of gay men never find one life partner. I’ve been fortunate enough to have had two and count my blessings that I have been so privileged to be able to share my life with such wonderful, unique men. They were very different but each was the right fit for who I was at that stage of my development.

People have been asking about arrangements. There will be a small private funeral for his family in Jasper and he will be buried in his family plot in Parrish, Alabama in Gray’s Cemetery. There will be a memorial service at a later date to which all who knew and loved him will be invited. (Think our annual holiday open house…) It will be held under the auspices of our beloved Unitarian Universalist Church of Birmingham but I may have to find a different venue because if even half the people who have said they want to, show up to pay respects, we aren’t all going to fit. I will communicate information about that after a date and time are chosen.

How can we honor him who has touched all of our lives? Those of you who want to do it in a tangible way, I’m asking that memorials be made to either the Unitarian Universalist Church of Birmingham Children’s Music Fund or to Opera Birmingham – two organizations near and dear to his heart. In more intangible ways, those of you with children, teach them to sing. If you don’t feel like you can, get them involved in a kids or youth choir or get them music lessons with an instrument they enjoy. Those of you without children, go out of your way to give the young people with an interest in music and performing arts a helping hand and a step up.

Others have been asking what do I need? There’s only one of me, so I don’t need a whole lot of food at the moment. I’m one of those get stressed, don’t eat a lot types. The house isn’t falling apart and the tax refund covered his funeral expenses (not what I was planning on using it on, but such is life). I need to feel connected. I need to be included. I need to not be treated differently. I need people to talk about him and us and tell funny stories and reminisce about shows we’ve done, or places we’ve been. I need to laugh. For the most part, I’m OK but I’m apt to burst into tears at weird moments. I can’t always tell if they are tears of sadness for what is gone or tears of joy for being so loved and cared for and so part of the fabric of what I call Bohemian Birmingham.

I’m likely to be doing some traveling over the next few months as I’ve always found that an effective form of self care. I may need someone to look in on the kitties from time to time.

Don’t be afraid to call or write or message or send me the latest crazy cat meme. I may not always answer, but I am reading them and feeling the love as I try to figure out what’s next. Two Sondheim lyrics (of course), are running through my brain…

Sometimes people leave you, halfway through the wood.
Do not let it grieve you, no one leaves for good.
You are not alone…

And

I chose and my world was shaken, so what?
The choice may have been mistaken,
The choosing was not.
You have to move on…

And move on I shall, I just don’t yet have a map or a compass or reliable GPS. They will come with time.

As I mentioned earlier, Tommy had totaled his car at the beginning of March. The next week, we went down to the Toyota dealership where we found a decent deal on the 2017s (the 2018s were on the lot and they had to make room). He had been driving a Prius V and loved it so he decided he wanted to stick with that and, when asked about the color, he decided on red. There was no red one on the lot, but they did locate one in Florida which they would have shipped up.

Between the time we paid for the car and the time it arrived from Florida, Tommy was hospitalized. I went down and picked it up for him, drove it home and parked it behind the house so it would be waiting for him when he got better. He never saw it, only the pictures I sent from my phone.

I decided I really didn’t want the first trip I made in the car to be to his family funeral service so I called up my good friend, Melissa Bailey, to see if she would pick me up and accompany me so I would have someone there other than relatives of his. She of course said yes. When she showed up that afternoon, she was driving her new car… a red Prius V. Tommy was going to have that car at his funeral no matter what.

The viewing ended up being easier than I thought. The funeral home tried but they parted his hair on the wrong side and I was able to distance myself emotionally from the man in the casket as it just wasn’t him. We stayed, talked as family for an hour or so, went to dinner at the Jasper Mall, and then Melissa took me home and I had a single malt scotch.

As soon as the person on the other end of the phone told me that it was UAB hospital calling, I knew what they were going to tell me. I’ve been involved in medicine long enough to know that middle of the night phone calls are always bad news. Tommy had died quickly and unexpectedly that night. He had been fine, talking to the nurse, then his blood pressure bottomed out and he lost his heart rhythm. We had made the decision some time before that he would be Do Not Resuscitate if anything happened as his heart was too weak to take CPR or other aggressive measures and all it would do would be to prolong his dying process. From the available data, I suspect that he had a massive pulmonary embolism from clotting in his legs which got worse with the necessary stopping of his heparin. Sometimes you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

I roused his family, called my sister (who is always up at all hours anyway) to have someone to talk to, and went in to the hospital to start the processes and rituals of unexpected death. The family gathered. I spent some time sitting with the lifeless man who had been my partner in all things for years and we made decisions. His mother wanted a family viewing and burial in the family plot in Parrish. We had breakfast, called the Jasper funeral home and set everything in motion. I had to get the word out and wrote this.

Tommy update: A few hours after I wrote my last update, Tommy had a sudden and irreversible cardiovascular collapse and died at 2:45 this morning. Word is starting to spread but I wanted everyone to hear it from me first. I will post more later but just can’t right now.

I don’t remember much else about the day. I know I went and had breakfast at Bogue’s, the local greasy spoon, and I ran into a couple of friends there who became the first people outside of family that I had to tell. I picked out the clothes in which he was to be buried. I went with his parents and brother to the funeral home to make the arrangements for the viewing, pick out the casket, and to the cemetery to make arrangements for the grave to be dug. I finished all that and came home feeling sad, a little frightened for the future, and most of all just feeling alone.

Things were finally taking an upturn. After weeks tethered to the bed by various pumps, all the assistive devices came out and he only had one more night to spend in bed before he would finally be able to get up and start moving and start with cardiac rehab and some physical therapy. I stayed with him as he was moved out of the ICU back to the telemetry unit, got him settled, helped with his bed bath and about 10 pm, headed home to get some sleep myself and I wrote this quick update.

Tommy update: Things have been going the right direction the last few days. He is out of the ICU setting and back in the CCU which is much more conducive to visitors. Both of the external pumps have been removed and he has so far remained stable so he can start getting out of bed for the first time in nearly a month tomorrow. Next stage is seeing how well his heart can meet the demands of his body and working on reducing the IV medications that have been stabilizing him.

He continues to encourage visitors as he is likely to be hospitalized for some days yet as he begins a long rehab process.

Things should get easier for me now that he is no longer tethered to the bed.

If you’d like to bring a meal to share with him, drop me a line.

I don’t remember what the last things were we said to each other. I know I got his breakfast order for the next morning and I remember that he was grumpy that he had to spend one more night flat on his back. The pumps were out but he had holes from them in a major leg artery that had to be allowed to clot off to keep from massive internal bleeding. His IVs kept running but they turned off the heparin for 24 hours per protocol.

I was dog tired and pretty much collapsed once I got home and got the usual chores done. The phone woke me up sometime after 2 in the morning.

Five days later and we had gotten into a routine. Tommy slowly improved. I started to plan out a life for us after he came home, trying to figure out what his needs would be and how we would pay for them. In the meantime, there were his spirits to be kept up, meals to be eaten, friends to visit…

Tommy Update – He remains in the CICU with both external pumps in place. The cardiologists are working to optimize his physiology in preparation for removing at least one later this week. He continues to feel OK and be awake and alert and welcomes adult visitors. Just get hold of me and let me know when you would like to come. Daytime visits 9-6 or evening after 8:30 (but he tends to go to sleep early).

What do we need? He still prefers outside food. If you would like to bring and share a meal, let me know and I can schedule that. We both need to remain connected to our lives so feel free to call/text/message us. He may not always answer depending on how he’s feeling but he does listen to/read them.

For the moment, our home life remains in abeyance but I am pretty much keeping up with what needs to be done. Except the garden. If anyone has nothing better to do and wants to come weed…

I will need to go back to work starting May 7th. If he’s still hospitalized, I may need some people to spend time with him while I am at work. I don’t know if we’ll be in that position or not.

Several people did come and help with the weeding. I was most grateful. I have no excuse now other than laziness.

The outpouring of concern that followed my initial post about Tommy and his health led me to start some more routine dialogue with everyone. This was my update from two days later.

Tommy update: He is in the CICU so they can keep a sharp eye on him. He has been stable with some improvement over the last day or so. He feels OK, other than being weak, and is very tired of being confined to bed. If he continues to do well, the plan is to get the pumps that assist his heart out of his system so he can start getting up and that’s what we’re focusing on now.

What can you do to help? This is a situation where thoughts and prayers are absolutely appropriate as what he needs for healing requires skilled cardiologists.and that’s beyond most of us.

He’s requiring blood products so if you’re a donor, go make a donation in his honor and replenish the system.

He hates the hospital food, so I’m bringing in a lot for him. If you would like to do that, message me as he does have some limitations in diet.

Visitors are fine, but again, message me as there are some restrictions on visiting hours and the CICU is not conducive to a lot of folk at once.

There may have been limitations on diet, but Tommy was having none of that. I spent a good portion of my time during his bed confinement running around to various restaurants to meet his whims for take out. There was nothing wrong with his appetite or his foodie instincts. And woe be unto me if I got any of the order wrong…

Our saga began, unknown to us, on the day of the annual Opera Gala in March of this past year. Tommy, as company manager, was intimately involved with a hundred myriad details getting everything ready and had left the house early that morning. I was at work per usual. About 10:30 AM I got a call from him that he had crashed his car on I-65 and could I come get him as he didn’t have time for that. I hurried off to where he was to find his Prius in the ditch with a busted axle, a very large light pole uprooted, and Tommy not the least bit hurt talking to a very nice state patrolman. Tommy had no idea what had happened. He had been driving down the road and then he was in the ditch. (In hindsight, he probably had a mild cardiac syncope event but we didn’t suspect that). I got the insurance people on the phone, found him a rental SUV and off he went at a mad dash to finish his day. I met him down at the ballroom in our glad rags and the party went off without a hitch due to his usual meticulous planning.

The next few weeks, were the usual production period blur. I was in the cast of Romeo and Juliette and he was busy with dozens of off stage tasks. He also came up with several score of wigs for a Red Mountain Theater showcase in there somewhere. By the time the opera was over, we were both tired. We closed on Sunday. He took Monday off and stayed in bed feeling fatigued, not unusual for him after a busy time. On Tuesday, he felt worse and his legs were starting to swell alarmingly. On Wednesday, he was worse still and I insisted he head for the ED. (He usually refused to listen to me about health issues. After all, what did I know about such things? I was only a doctor and he was a nurse and therefore much more knowledgeable as he saw it). There, he was found to be in fulminant congestive heart failure due to previously unsuspected coronary artery disease. He was admitted to the cardiac service while people tried to figure out what to do. He was admitted on March 28th. It took the cardiologists nearly two weeks to decide that his best option was cardiac stents to open his blocked vessels and, just after his birthday on April 10th, he finally went to the cath lab and had seven stents placed in an eleven hour procedure. His heart needed rest and he was placed on bilateral assist pumps intravenously to do some of the work of his heart.

Tommy was always very guarded with personal information so while our close friends and families knew what was up, we hadn’t posted anything specific on Facebook or elsewhere. He finally decided the time was right on April 17th when he was through his surgery and slowly getting better in the ICU. This was my entry:

Those of you who know us know that Tommy is a very private individual while I am much more the let it all hang out there type. Because of this, I have waited until he felt it was time to post about what has been going on with us the last few weeks.

Three weeks ago, just after Romeo and Juliette closed, Tommy developed sudden onset shortness of breath and body swelling. In the emergency room, they found that he had serious, and previously unknown cardiac disease and was in heart failure. Since that time, he has been hospitalized at UAB in the CCU. I won’t bore you all with all of the dramas and complications of the last few weeks but will say that a number of very good cardiologists have found a route out of the hospital for him. The first major step occurred yesterday when he was given seven stents in his heart and a temporary assistive pump.

He is currently confined to bed due to the pump, but is awake and alert and doesn’t feel that bad, just weak. It’s been a long journey but will continue for quite some time. We’re taking it day by day.

We don’t have any immediate needs. He is well cared for at the hospital. I am home to sleep, and take care of the house and cats, but spend as much time with him as I can. My job has been very understanding about some extended and unplanned time off. This all may change as things progress.

I will try to keep people updated as we navigate this unexpected detour from life. Our usual activities are in abeyance. If you are expecting something from us in the near future, I apologize but we’re unlikely to be able to meet that obligation at this time.

If you have questions, feel free to call, text, email or message me. Tommy is not always up to communicating. .

I’m a good enough doctor to recognize how seriously ill he was, but my assumption was that he would recover enough to come home to a somewhat reduced life (which he was not going to like…) I was wrong.

Here’s some quick biographical details so if you’re new to me and my story, you won’t get too confused. I was raised in Seattle, Washington, the eldest child of three. My father was a professor of oceanography at the University of Washington and my mother taught various sciences at the local junior college. I grew up in the city proper, just east of the University in a neighborhood which was faculty ghetto at the time my parents moved in but which is far too expensive for that these days. I went to a well regarded prep school, Lakeside, for high school and then headed off to Stanford University for undergraduate (much to the chagrin of my mother who had gone to UC Berkeley). I returned back to Seattle for medical school, and then went back to California and UC Davis for residency, fellowship and my first faculty position in geriatric medicine.

I met Steve (Jon Steven Spivey), my first partner about six months after arriving in Sacramento, finally came out officially (to the surprise of absolutely no one) and we lived there together happily for nearly ten years. In the late 1990s, UC Davis had a melt down, the clinical geriatrics program was caught in the cross fire and I was suddenly out of a job. Ultimately, I took the position I currently hold at University of Alabama Birmingham and Steve and I moved cross country. Steve became ill with pulmonary fibrosis about a year after we arrived and I cared for him for another two years until his death. A year or so later, when I was toying with moving back to the west coast, I met Tommy (Louie Tommy Thompson Jr.) who became my second partner. Together we developed a life in Birmingham full of professional accomplishments and music and theater.

Tommy, who had never had the most robust health, developed serious heart disease suddenly in the spring of 2018, was hospitalized, and died suddenly and unexpectedly from his heart problems. We had fifteen years together, including four of legal marriage. I am adjusting to being alone again. At fifty six, I’m young enough for a third act but I’m too darned tired to train a new husband at this point. I’m going to content myself with my aging self, my aging cats, my aging patients, the Unitarian Universalist Church of Birmingham, and my theater peeps.

I am nursing a beast of a head cold and sitting here in bed trying to decide the best way to deal with all of my writings and musings from the last year. As all of you are aware, I lost Tommy, my life partner, unexpectedly this last April. This is the second time I’ve been widowed. My first partner, Steve, died in 2001. One of the things I learned in recovering from Steve’s death is that writing about my thoughts, memories and feelings helped me to process what had happened to me and so I began to write prolonged posts for Facebook after Tommy fell ill. It was a way for me to update friends and family, a way to sort out what was going on in my head, and a way for me to creatively cope with a cruel situation.

Another thing I learned from losing Steve was that travel is healing for me. This led to me taking some time off work and road tripping across the country and back. It has also led to me starting to book a number of exotic trips so I can start working my way through my life list of things I want to see before I die. As I am currently traveling alone, I have no one to debrief with at dinner about the day and what I have seen and what my impressions are so some of my writings have taken the form of public travelogue so that others can comment and fill in the gap.

When I took stock of what I have been writing at the first of the year, I realized I had written nearly 100 essays of varying lengths. They run the gamut from discussions of the ephemera of my usual day to thoughts on culture and politics to descriptions of places I have wandered off to stories of my past. There’s enough material there to make something interesting. I don’t know yet if it’s memoir or book or performance piece. The first thing it is is this blog, a place I can put them all, start categorizing, and let anyone who is interested start getting a sense of who I am and how I manage to cope with pain and loss.

The plan is to put all of the pieces I have written so far here in chronological order. I’ll do a little editing and clean them up some as I reread them. I tend to write very quickly in a stream of consciousness style so when I go back and look, at times I cringe and find I have to change things somewhat to make me sound less stupid. Once they are in order, I’ll open this up to inquisitive eyes and suggestions for what else this material might become.

So buckle up, here we go….   and don’t forget your towel.

 

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton