It’s funny how life online works.  It has been widely and accurately observed that it gives you a sense of false intimacy with others. Of course that is true. But sometimes, the intimacy our online lives give us is real, or at least feels real, in ways that can’t be explained, but can be felt. Or so it seems to me anyway. This is a clumsy wind-up to a post about the death of Hilary Teachout, the wife of my friend Terry Teachout, the drama critic of the Wall Street Journal. She died not of Covid, but from complications from a double lung transplant, for which she and her devoted husband had been waiting for years. Terry wrote on his blog, announcing her death:

Hilary Dyson Teachout, the “Mrs. T” of this blog, suffered throughout the decade and a half of our life together from pulmonary hypertension, a rare and devastating illness that gnawed inexorably at her body without touching her soul. She was smart, funny, generous, and gallant, a perfect companion and the love of my life. Indeed, we fell in love at first sight, a thing I had never thought possible until, at the improbable age of forty-nine, it happened to me, followed in the shortest order that I could manage by a middle age full of shared joy. Alas, Hilary lacked the strength to survive the double-lung transplant that we had hoped would give her more life, and now she is gone.

Loss is the price of love: I knew from the start that I was likely to lose her too soon, though I was lucky beyond belief to have her for far longer than her doctors foresaw. But merely to know such a thing cannot begin to ready us for its coming. Raymond Aron said it: “There is no apprenticeship to misfortune. When it strikes us, we still have everything to learn.” I shall now try to learn the lesson of misfortune in a manner as worthy as possible of my beloved Hilary, who faced death as she faced life, with indomitable courage.

Here’s the thing: I have never met Terry, but have only known him through correspondence and text messaging over the years. And I never exchanged even that much communication with Mrs. T., as Terry called her. But to have been Terry’s reader on his blog and his Twitter feed was to have known this couple as if they were old friends. As Mrs. T.’s conditioned worsened over the past week, Terry let me and his readers know. I would fall asleep at night praying for her, and wake up praying for her. This says exactly nothing about my sanctity, and everything about how much I love these two people, whom I’ve never met.

How strange is that? All I can say is that there are surely lots of people, Terry’s readers, who can say the same thing today, and mean it. The thing about Terry Teachout is that not only is he a fine critic, but he also has in spades something that you don’t often find in critics: a heart overflowing with generosity. I say this as someone who was a critic for part of my career. It’s a profession that can embitter one, because in order to do it well, you have to hone your perceptive and analytical faculties to understand why a piece of art, writing, or performance works, or why it fails to work. Because most of what you will see as a critic misses the mark, and because bad or mediocre work is a lot easier and more fun to review than good or great work, it is far too easy to become nasty, and to revel in the clever dig. When I look back on my own reviews, this is what I most regret.

Terry Teachout won’t have those regrets. It’s not that he’s a pushover as a critic — far from it. It’s that as with Roger Ebert, you sense that when he pans something, he’s not doing it out of pleasure. He genuinely loves music and theater, and music and theater people. You get the idea that he really wants them to excel.

A lot of this is no doubt inborn; judging from his writing and tweeting, he’s a naturally sunny guy, a Midwesterner through and through. But I have to figure that a lot of that comes from the sheer joy he took in being married to Mrs. T. Terry is a man who lived in a state of constant wonder at the gift of Mrs. T., and the opportunity to love her. Following their story over the years, you could see that loving Mrs. T., with her medical condition, took a lot out of Terry, her caregiver. But it was equally clear that the gift of loving her was an exhilarating grace.

Terry once wrote about what he called the “miracle” of their meeting, when they were both forty-nine:

We met at a dinner party and fell in love at first sight. Then I learned that she had an incurable disease with a life expectancy of two years. Then I was stricken with congestive heart failure mere days before what was supposed to be our first date. I called her from the emergency room to break the date. Unfazed, she came to the hospital. We’ve been together ever since. Instead of dying on schedule, she fooled the doctors and lived. Now she needs a life-saving double lung transplant—and we’re counting on our luck to hold one more time.

In 2017, with Mrs. T’s permission, he disclosed her illness to his readers, and used it to educate them about the rare condition from which she suffered, and to talk about the importance of organ donation. Three years ago, Terry wrote about their romance here, on the occasion of their tenth wedding anniversary. Excerpt:

To marry in middle age is an adventure in and of itself. Mrs. T and I are both stubborn, settled creatures of long-established habit, and though we quickly made room for each other in our lives, it wasn’t always easy for us to get along. Yet that never seemed to matter, and still doesn’t: I know that from the night we met, I’ve never wanted to share my life with anyone else. She has opened doors in my heart and soul that I didn’t even know existed. Among many, many other things, I have no doubt whatsoever that had we not met, I wouldn’t have found it within myself to start writing for the stage. When I took my first curtain call, she was in the audience, cheering loudly and proudly. She’s been there ever since.

It is a miraculous thing to suddenly find yourself living with a smart, funny, indomitably gallant woman, an everyday miracle that is far too easily taken for granted. I know I do that sometimes, and I hate myself for it, but far more often than not, I’m intensely aware of how lucky I am to have met Mrs. T, and how much luckier I am that she was willing to settle down with me.

When, eleven years ago, the then-future Mrs. T and I trimmed our first Christmas tree together in Connecticut, I made the following observation: “To be happy, not in memory but in the moment, is the shining star on the tree of life.” That is what I am, and she is the person to whom I owe it. Our marriage is the best thing to have happened to me in a life overflowing with good fortune. May it go on and on.

It did, until yesterday — in one sense. But in another, their love is eternal. I don’t mean that in a sentimental way, either. Last week, I told Terry that in reading about their devotion to each other, I’ve thought about Dante in Paradise — how the blessed in eternity are transparent; the light of divinity shines through them like sunlight through clear glass. She did not choose the hell of her suffering in the body, but the way they both met it refined their love. And for we spectators who have despaired, as everyone does at times, of life and of love, the depth and effervescence of Mr. and Mrs. T. cheered us like a deep draft of vintage Champagne. That’s how it was for me, at least. She was God’s gift to him, and through him, to us all.

Here, from Canto XXXI of Paradiso, is Dante’s address to Beatrice, whose sacrifices of love for him brought the pilgrim Dante out of the dark wood, and into the fullness of God’s love and beatitude. I imagine these words in Terry Teachout’s heart when he is reunited with Mrs. T in eternity:

I raised my eyes up there

and saw her, mirroring eternal rays,

to form a crown or aureole around.

 

From that high region where thunder rolls,

no mortal eye could ever be so far —

though sunk beneath the ocean’s utmost depth —

 

as my sight was from Beatrice now.

Yet that meant nothing. For her image came

not blurred or lessened by the space between.

 

‘In you, beloved, my hope grows strong. All this

you bore: To greet me and to make me whole,

you left your footprint in the depth of Hell.

 

The inward strength and grace of everything

I since have see has come to me, I know,

through you, your goodness and your grace and power.