Dan

In 1986 Gilda Radner was married to Gene Wilder and looking ahead to a quieter life after the years that had made her famous on Saturday Night Live. Then the exhaustion began. Sudden spells of fogginess left her struggling to stay awake. A doctor suggested Epstein-Barr virus. The episodes kept returning. Her abdomen swelled painfully. Cramps and shooting pains in her legs followed. On a trip to Paris she doubled over on the street. She saw more physicians. One attributed the trouble to ovulation. Another suspected a stomach issue. Tests came back reassuring even as her condition grew worse. According to Wilder, one doctor described her as a nervous, emotional woman who simply needed to relax. Radner asked more than once whether the symptoms could be cancer. She was told not to worry. In October 1986 doctors finally identified ovarian cancer. Surgery showed it had already spread to her liver and bowel. Wilder later recalled her response: “Thank God, finally someone believes me!” She underwent surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. For a period the disease went into remission. She returned to television and made jokes about the illness that had nearly killed her. The cancer came back. Gilda Radner died on May 20, 1989, at the age of forty-two, with Wilder beside her. Those ten months of dismissed symptoms stayed with him. After her death he pressed for earlier detection and helped establish a hereditary cancer program in her name. Her experience also led to Gilda’s Club, a place where people facing cancer could find support and company. The comedian who had made audiences laugh for years spent her final stretch asking to be believed, then turning the same sharp humor toward the disease that would take her.🌹

Carol Burnett was 68 when she buried her eldest daughter. Carrie Louise Hamilton died on January 20, 2002, at 38, of pneumonia that followed lung cancer which had already reached her brain. The woman who had spent decades making millions laugh found herself unable to face the morning. Grief did not arrive as a stranger. It arrived carrying the same familiar luggage—alcoholism, poverty, fractured hopes, and a love that had always been real and never simple. Burnett was born in San Antonio on April 26, 1933, to Joseph Thomas “Jody” Burnett, a movie-theater manager, and Ina Louise Creighton, a publicity writer. Both parents drank. After they separated, Carol and her younger half-sister Chrissie were raised mainly by their maternal grandmother, Mabel “Mae” White, in a cramped Hollywood boarding-house apartment. Money was so scarce that someone might arrive with a chicken to fry, or clothes might arrive already worn by someone else. Down the hall, adults fought over liquor and unpaid bills. In that one-room world, the girl who would become a star practiced drawing perfect families that did not exist outside her imagination. Both parents died young of alcoholism—her father in 1954 at 47, her mother a few years later at 46. Carol, still a teenager, became responsible for Chrissie. The same girl who had lived on hand-me-downs reached Broadway in 1959 in Once Upon a Mattress. By 1967 The Carol Burnett Show had made her a household name. Viewers saw the ear tug that said hello to Nanny, the Tarzan yell she had taught herself as a child, the open-mouthed laughter. They did not see the weight she carried from the boarding-house years. In 1963 she married producer Joe Hamilton. They had three daughters: Carrie, born December 5, 1963; then Jody and Erin. Carrie was creative, bright, and, by her teenage years, caught in addiction. Burnett has spoken of that period without softening it. She put Carrie into treatment before she turned 18, during a stretch of years Carrie later called hell—years when her daughter hated her for doing the only thing a mother could do. It was not the television version of motherhood. It was love that chose the painful step first and then waited years to be understood. Carrie eventually got clean. She became an actress, writer, singer, and playwright. Mother and daughter later worked together adapting Burnett’s memoir One More Time into the play Hollywood Arms, drawn directly from the childhood poverty and the women who had raised her. In August 2001 Carrie was diagnosed with lung cancer. It spread to her brain. Five months later, cancer-related pneumonia took her. Burnett had already buried both parents. Now she was burying a daughter. She did not pretend the grief was graceful. She has said she did not want to get out of bed. Her husband told her she owed it to Carrie and to the director Hal Prince to finish what they had started. She went to Chicago for the play her daughter would never see. In the hotel room, birds-of-paradise flowers waited—the same flower Carrie had tattooed on her shoulder. A bottle of champagne arrived labeled “Louise,” Carrie’s middle name and the name of Burnett’s own mother. On opening night it rained. Burnett has said she and Carrie always loved the rain, and she felt her daughter near. What stayed with her most was Carrie’s fierce way of living. A person lives on, Burnett has reflected, in the people they touch, in the inspiration they give, in the way they alter someone else’s plan even for a moment—get them to think, rage, cry, laugh, argue, or walk around the block dazed. She has said she never got over Carrie. She learned to breathe around the empty space. Some hearts keep laughing because stopping would hurt too much. 🌹