On the Death of Mira Furlan: Her Life too Large for my Small Pen

On the morning after, I come out of sleep and for a moment think it was just a dream. Like my tangled arms, themselves asleep, the focaccia in the crooked restaurant, Mira, it was just a dream. But the waking world creeps in, and remembrance of yesterday, of Mira’s death, comes with it.

It’s true that I had listened to her CD only a few days ago. It’s true that I figured out why Patti Smith, an artist we both greatly admire, has and uses Instagram. I needed to share this discovery with Mira. It’s true I’d been thinking of her, of Mira, for weeks now and why didn’t I call her? Would she have answered? Probably not, being as sick as she was. Would anyone have answered? Her husband, Goran? Her son, Marko?

Mira loathed social media, and couldn’t believe Patti Smith had an Instagram account. Which is why I needed to tell her, and of course Mira would understand, that Patti got her own account because people were out there impersonating her. People were out there collecting “donations” in Patti Smith’s name, claiming the “donations” were for her climate change nonprofit organization, Pathway To Paris. I think Mira would like Patti’s page.

Are people impersonating Mira too? A mutual friend posts the cryptic “it’s not true, check with her rep” on my Instagram post acknowledging Mira’s passing. “That account wasn’t run by her,” says our friend (referring to Mira’s final tweet).

This is too strange.

I fly up and down the stairs in the bathrobe I’ve been wearing all afternoon, up to use the bathroom and back down with the winged excitement of Juliet — she’s not dead!?! But back in my grandmother’s TV room, I realize it cannot be. My friend admits to not checking facts herself — a statement in Variety she believes Mira’s manager made, she hasn’t bothered to check on; she can’t get through to anyone at Mira’s house, but Mira’s family confirm her death publicly. Perhaps my friend, like the rest of us confronting mortality at some point or another, does not yet want to believe in it.

I was in the garage. It was early in the morning and I’d just sent a birthday video message to my friend Regina in London. I wore my swatch cap (like Patti), my Chief Joseph coat (going on 15 years now), glasses, and my Silvertone guitar. For whatever reason, I decided to check my email. Because my work currently involves caring for my grandma, with whom I live, and writing songs, I try not to use email, text, Instagram until after a certain hour. But on this morning, Friday January 22, 2021, I let open the gates of the world. And there, flatly, frankly, was an email from my former boss and sometime director, titled “Mira”. It read:

Dear Lexie,

Mira Furlan passed away last night. I thought you would like to know.

I hope you and Dean are well.

The man who blows the leaves at the house next door tends diligently to his duties. His blower roars that terrible, deafening sound. The old ladies in the house drink their tea and coffee and hold a newspaper whose words they cannot comprehend. Dean sleeps, for he’d been up well after 1am, doing laundry away from hawk eyes, and writing songs.

I’m glad I didn’t smash my Silvertone. How it came off my body, strap lifted over shoulder, I don’t know. The sudden news, such a blow, she may as well have died in a car wreck.

Howling, I paced back and forth. Words like no no no no no and fucking shit and Mira and what the fuck formed on my tongue and were released. The surge after the blow was such that I’m surprised, again, that I didn’t break anything. I check the linked article my old boss included in the email. It was a report from the BBC confirming Mira’s death, caused by complications due to the West Nile virus.

Does it matter, what causes our death? I think Mira would think something along these lines, something I think I heard John Lewis say, Lewis who maybe was quoting Martin Luther King, Jr…that what matters is what you would die for, only then can you figure out how to live.

Mira, champion of love. Champion of art. Champion of soul. Champion of heart. In her eyes I saw myself as I knew I could be, as I wanted to be. She already knew that me in me.

She read more than anyone I know. She knew herself, and knew that maybe there are no answers, but that did not stop her from looking for them. Anne Bogart and Tadashi Suzuki come to mind, renowned international practitioners of theater. Long ago, a British actor friend gave me Bogart’s book, And Then You Act: Making Art in an Unpredictable World, as a momento of our friendship. Bogart, who is American, wrote the book in response to the September 11th attacks. It took me years to pick it up. But when I finally did, it was like a new path through a thick wood opened before me, a path, with even a map marker on a wood post at its start.

At the art college where Mira and I taught, we both taught a terribly challenging, sometimes beautiful, and to some, quite possibly terribly pointless class. The class was called Art, Culture & Society and the few of us who were marked to teach it, mostly women, may well understand its beauty and its peril. There was no textbook, there was no guide. There was a kind of “outline” for just how one’s syllabus should go, but let’s just say the few years I taught this class gave me much anguish, albeit some pleasure, for as Georgia O’Keeffe, a onetime art teacher herself, said, “How can one teach art?”

Well, I wish we could ask Mira. Mira lived and died for Art. We bonded through that class, and again through Bogart’s book, which helped both of us with the class, and I think in life. It helped me in life. In the book Bogart speaks of her colleague, Suzuki, who says with precision, “International cultural exchange is impossible - therefore we must try.”

Mira was a refugee. As war broke out in 1991, she fled her home in the former Yugoslavia after receiving death threats. Too many death threats. Filip Stojanovski recalls this lesser known (in the West) part of Mira’s life in a written piece for Global Voices. She had continued to cross the border from her home in Croatia to perform in a play in Belgrade, Serbia. When first meeting Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski, Mira said, “Yes, they could have killed me. So what? Art should have no borders.”

In February — March of 2020, before the severity of COVID-19 fully struck the world, Mira traveled to Croatia for an artist’s residency. Primarily to write, I think, in a room with a view of the sea. In Rijeka, I think. Mira often spoke of Rijeka. Quickly upon settling in, she realized Anne Bogart was there too, giving talks and working on a production of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. Mira could not believe her luck, that Bogart was there too, that they were together, meeting, talking about Art and performance. Working. Mira even sent me a few pictures of the two of them together. Wow.

I can’t find those pictures now.

Time passed as I prowled around the garage. No one to hear my bellows, my cries. What does one do, receiving such shocking news? I never knew she was sick.

Eventually, I enter the house. The old ladies sit at the breakfast table in their cloud of delusion. I pass through the kitchen, unnoticed. What does one do?

Maybe it’s better that one day she’s just gone, that no one knew she was sick, she was suffering. Maybe it’s not better. It just is. What was she thinking these last few months, weeks, days? Could she have been thinking of the manifesto of Marina Abramovic? Of the tenet Different Death Scenarios?

Different Death Scenarios

• An artist has to be aware of his own mortality
• For an artist, it is not only important how he lives his life but also how he dies
• An artist should look at the symbols of his work for the sign of different death scenarios
• An artist should die consciously without fear
• An artist should die consciously without fear
• An artist should die consciously without fear

Inside my grandmother’s and I have to get out of here. With both old ladies here, sometimes the house caves in, like its walls are poisoned, infected with delusion and pretense and lovelessness, and its beams lose their strength, nails start to break, the house caves in.

I dress for a walk and leave a note for Dean. He stirs, wakes, and in a breath I tell him Mira died last night and I lose control if I thought I had any and he catches me in my sobs. He holds me while I cry, and then I go.

I walk south, towards T street, to get away from the Fabulous Forties which don’t seem so fabulous when the assault of the leaf blower is constant. There seems to be more sky in the Elmhurst neighborhood. Maybe because the houses are smaller. We finally have clouds today and I figure in Elmhurst they will be more accessible.

The bare trees are like a thousand ballerinas, curved and straight, bowed and upright, so gracefully they reach toward the sky, nodding in time, as if to say, “Yes, welcome sky with clouds, it is January, you are in the right place, welcome. Let us stretch, let us dance even more brilliantly for you.”

At T street and 48th I turn east, somehow lead by the belly of T’s green median, somehow held atop the branches of these ballerina trees. Mira’s face, and twinkling sea green eyes, an arm’s length away.

I turn right on 55th and right again on U. There are no blowers here. The smaller bungalows give me hope. For what, I’m not sure. And then a cat bounds across the street to stop in front of my feet with a demanding meow. Mira? Your cats must miss you. I crouch down to pet the feline, gray and tan and small and unafraid. He rolls onto his back, purring, and reaches both front arms up to pull my hand back down and gnaw on my knuckles. Fearless, and happy.

Continuing down U, two blocks later, another cat, this one from behind a converted camper, bounds before my feet and stops me with a demanding meow. His hair is longer, thick and black and tan and white. Mira? Have you sent me these cats? The Fabulous Forties is all but devoid of them, nothing like Murakami’s town of cats. I crouch down to pet the feline and he too rolls on his back, purring, and then reaches his paws up to pull my hand down and gnaw on my knuckles.

The sky is one giant cloud now. A swath of gray covers what blue there was. Excellent. I am back across the tracks between 39th and 40th, walking along R street where I peek into a Little Free Library. I’m perpetually disappointed in these delightful creations. Mira would be too. There’s never anything I want! It’s always Danielle Steel and Nora Roberts and Pat Conroy. Why not Dostoevsky or Nora Ephron or Patti Smith? Or Milkman by Anna Burns. A book Mira so desperately wanted me to read. A very light rain begins to fall and I decide to look anyway.

Books. Performance. Art. Devotion. Mira was devoted. To the truth. To the blade of it.

The light rain is barely recognizable. I peer inside. There is John Lewis. John Lewis? Yes, John Lewis. Across that Bridge. What’s he doing inside? I pull it out. He too recently left the land of living. He too was devoted to the truth. He’s not who I expected to find, but I know Mira would want me to have his book. His Vision for Change and the Future of America completes the title of this almost square, perfectly small, paperback.

Mira died within hours of the inauguration of the 46th U.S. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. Was she lucid enough to know what had happened? Mira fled her homeland as it raged in blood under an authoritarian leader who suppressed the freedom of the press, ran a xenophobic agenda in which police brutality, bombings of towns and cities, assassinations, hyperinflation became the norm. As did election fraud. The leader who ran on a populist ticket backed the armed forces that began the attacks on what would become the Bosnian genocide and also ordered a program of ethnic cleansing of Kosovar Albanians. Mira knew these truths all too well and never shied from speaking up against the dangers of America’s fascist strains.

Why did she have to go now?

I can hear her voice. There is still so much I need to talk to her about.

Why did she have to go now? What would she tell me?

Look to Anne Bogart, to Patti Smith. Look to John Lewis.

Okay, Mira. I will look to them. And to Babylon 5. And to your films I’ve not yet seen. I’ll keep listening to your CD, and hope and pray your book is posthumously released. I’ll look to the cats in the street and the ballerina trees and the clouds in January. I will look. Mira. Mira.