Singer’s Spirit Rises Above Her Fatal Illness : Soprano Lives to Sing ‘Messiah’ in Moscow

Deb Comer is singing herself alive.

Nine years ago, she became sick with scleroderma, a deadly disease that hardens the skin and continues inward to freeze up the body’s connective tissues and internal organs.

Throughout her struggle, she has sung soprano with the Cypress Masterworks Chorale, which she joined 11 years ago.

“I think it’s kept me going,” Comer said. “It’s hard to have your body falling apart on you. The singing has been therapy for me.”

The chorale has been invited to sing Handel’s “Messiah” in Moscow and St. Petersburg this winter--among the first performances since the anti-religious Bolsheviks seized power more than 70 years ago. Comer is determined to go, and her 13-year-old daughter, Tegan, is trying to find donors willing to share the $2,500 cost of the trip.

“For the first year, I thought it was a bad dream and it would go away,” Comer, 41, said of the disease. But it hasn’t left her. Two years ago, the single mother of four became even more seriously ill when her kidneys failed and she went on dialysis.

Sheridan Ball, a close friend and the chorale’s director, is impressed with Comer’s ability to live with a fatal disease. “Deb took it in stride,” he said. “It shocked her, but if anything, it inspired her to accomplish as much as she could because she has so little time.”

Comer’s kidneys have begun working again, but she is told she may only live for five or 10 more years. She is not bitter about her death sentence. “This disease to me has been a blessing,” she said. “It’s changed my priorities. I used to get really concerned about things that don’t matter. I don’t care (anymore) about how my kids dress, or how they wear their hair.”

She does care about her singing.

In 1989, the chorale sang the “Messiah” at Carnegie Hall in New York, and Comer bought her plane ticket with money her mother left her. She taped the recording and recalls that the audience applauded for two minutes and 20 seconds. “I cried,” she said.

For an encore, the chorale sang the “Hallelujah Chorus,” the most famous selection from the oratorio.

And in 1986, Comer was able to travel to Germany with the chorale. She made friends there and began to study German at Cal State Fullerton when she cameback.

Professors at Cal State Fullerton have encouraged her to write a book about her fight to stay healthy and provided her with a computer. Comer has kept journals during her illness and wrote a short story for her dialysis support group when she had kidney failure. But she is modest about becoming an author and a role model. “I don’t think I’m anything special,” she said.

Her friends disagree. “She is very inspiring to people,” Ball said. “I don’t think she is even aware of it. People always ask about her. She never seeks any kind of pity. That is very foreign to her. She really soaks up life.”

But Comer doesn’t see herself as an angel. “There are times when I get really depressed, and I throw things and I cry,” she said. “I get frustrated with trying to raise the kids that I have, not the disease. It’s so scary, when you have four young children.”

It’s also scary because she has to support her family on welfare and Social Security benefits that she receives because of her disability.

Comer lives in a quiet working-class neighborhood of Stanton, where the local baseball team, the MacDuffers, is named after the street its team members live on. Carolyne Leenerts, a neighbor, met Comer 10 years ago, when they both played for the MacDuffers. “She’s a person who really cares about other people,” Leenerts said.

And Kellie Kindell, another neighbor, became friends with Comer when she began baby-sitting Tegan. Kindell went to Germany with Comer on the chorale trip. “She loved it, singing in all the churches,” Kindell said. “For me it wasn’t that big of a deal. She hears every little echo, everything that’s beautiful with music. I don’t.”

Comer had never sung publicly before joining the chorale. She began taking voice lessons a year before starting with the group, just because she liked to sing Barbra Streisand songs around the house. Now she listens to Handel and Mozart as well.

“She listens to all that opera stuff,” Kindell said. “It’s like her life.”

Comer never finished high school and was married at 17. She had planned to be a teacher after graduating this summer from Fullerton but says she is sick too often now to work. When Comer speaks about her life, it seems that she has no bounds: She wants to be a writer and has already written 240 pages of letters to a friend in Germany about her life with the disease--the doctors, the dialysis and her family.

She writes about her illness frankly. When she was on dialysis, she wrote, “whether these techs are holding an emesis basin or taking cover from a pulsating, squirting artery, they do it with great competence, love and a sense of humor.”

Comer has also begun writing songs. A week ago, she was asked to sing at a friend’s funeral. She didn’t feel that well, so she declined the invitation. But the night before the funeral, she woke up at 1:30 a.m. and started humming a tune, she said. She got out of bed and went into the kitchen to get some milk. Then she sat at a table and wrote out the words to a memorial hymn. She sang it the next day at the funeral.

At home, Comer tells jokes, laughs and argues with her son about how late he may stay out on a school night. But a moment later she mentions that last month she had surgery on her esophagus because it was swelling closed and made her choke on her food. And as she hands a glass of iced-tea to a visitor, she looks at a bandage on her arm and comments that she will have to have surgery there to remove an infected shunt that was placed under her skin for dialysis.

Comer once read that victims of the disease typically live 15 to 20 years after diagnosis, but she’s not going to accept that. “I never thought I would only live that long,” she said. “But I also said that my hands were never going to get crippled, and they are.”

Chorale director Ball said that donations for Comer’s trip may be sent to Cypress Masterworks Chorale at 9200 Valley View St., Cypress, Calif. 90630.