Wednesday, May 31, 2023
Here's a strange thing: for the last three weeks our friend Fran Heaney has been in my thoughts. Every day. Her presence and memories of her days at RISD and sharing a house in Cambridge, kept flowing back unsummoned in a pleasant jumble of scenes. Then I learned the other day that Fran had passed away.
I have to admit this is hitting me hard. Fran Heaney was one of the first friends I met in Providence when I used to hang out at the RISD snack bar on breaks from the Trinity Square Theater Company where I was a set carpenter. This was years before our shared house on Somerville Avenue in Massachusetts. I remember thinking “who is this hilarious red-haired beauty sitting next to me?” Turned out she was exceedingly good company. Right from the start she seemed to know me—brushed my defenses aside like the chimeras they were. Didn’t wait for introductions, but was a best friend right from the get-go. I was convinced it was true too—that she knew me right down to where the soul latches on to the heart. How? I didn’t know, but the offhand remarks she used to make? The kind that make you pause in mid-stride and say wait a minute so you could think about it while she continues on her way a few steps ahead? I thought there was a window in my head that only she could see through. It had to be. I remember watching her walk down Benefit Street, a head over everyone else, always smiling, sometimes singing. Singing! Soon after we met, Fran invited me to dinner at her apartment on Benefit Street (122 Benefit Street—top floor, which I lived in myself two years later—casement windows, dormers, a real artist’s living space. Her friend Jessica and another friend, Chris Lyons were also there. There were many other get togethers, other dinners, but that one I remember because it was the first. The conversation picked up fast and I was surprised when I understood how much she knew. When Chris and I left the apartment, our heads were spinning. We were dazzled by all that we had talked about.
The last time I contacted Fran was in 2015. I emailed her after I saw a photo of some of our mutual RISD friends that she had posted on Facebook. She phoned me afterwards, but I was unluckily away from my phone and missed the call. But she did leave a voicemail message in which she invited me to visit her in upstate New York and to bring my daughter Eugenia, who lived in Brooklyn at the time. She told me how huge her house was and how there was plenty of room. Just before she hung up, she said she loved me, but since it was only a voicemail, I couldn’t tell her I loved her too, although I sure as hell wanted to. For some reason I didn’t call her back. Probably because I always thought a road trip to New York was imminent and I would just turn left at the Hudson River when I finally got there and drop in unannounced. The Irish hello. All that leaving and returning—I thought it would last forever.
I heard that her last words were “Please change the channel.” To me that is so Fran Heaney. She leaves us laughing and crying at the same time with a phrase that is serious and funny and sorrowful, but also at its core carrying a small glimmer of hope that maybe death is just a matter of sidestepping from one channel into another. The kind of parting words that leave us filled with wonder and gratitude that such a friend somehow found her way into our lives only to leave us so wrenchingly sad when it became time for her to go.
