Actress’ Path to Understanding Is Fraught With Pain

Sometimes, late at night, Sue Gaetzman is barely aware of the flickering television, its volume turned low--yet she cannot turn it off. The night runs deep, and she is alone except for reruns that stir the past and never stay gone for very long.

The two most important men in her life are dead now. One was the dreamer, the other was the dream. Then there was Brent Adams. He was only 8 years old.

Her father, her husband, her organ donor. From one to the other they, in various ways, gave her life, then left.

Then there are the women in her life. A sister, too, is gone. Her mother lives in a nursing home, her mind adrift on the slow, shifting waves of Alzheimer’s disease. Death seems always close, a shadow of sun and moon and tender memories.

But the thing about the dead, says Sue, is that they leave a legacy of love. It is what she draws upon to buoy hope and strength, faith that the morning will come.

The dead also leave a message, which is more problematic in that it requires the living to make delivery. So Sue, 46, has become a writer, a poet, delivering words about gifts she has found and been given by those she loved.

“It’s all about what we give to each other before we go,” she says. “Love from my husband, humor from my sister, craziness from my dad, two organs from a little boy.”

She recently wrote and performed a one-person autobiographical play at the Tamarind Theatre in Hollywood. It was called “Blood Sugar,” its title taken from her 31 years of living with diabetes.

In the play, dysfunction, illness, joy and tragedy serve as a backdrop to her search for understanding and peace. Neither victim nor heroine, she portrays herself as a seeker.

The script is a collection of poems and essays, one of them titled “Have I Said It All.” It’s about her husband’s final days, when he was unable to speak. “And then he wrote: ‘I love you with all my heart, but I’m ready to be with God.’ There was some isolated part of me that understood. It wasn’t about me. Maybe it never was.”

For much of her life, Sue was a character actor. In a 1979 Pacific Bell commercial, she was featured with a ventriloquist’s dummy made to look like her. In 1985, she played socialite Madeline Rutherford on “Days of Our Lives.” She also had small roles in films including 1991’s “The Doctor” and segments of TV shows including “Roseanne.”

But, as often happens in Hollywood, the well ran dry. In the early 1990s, the phone stopped ringing, and Sue walked away from acting. By then, she had met a man, fallen in love and married. It was the happiest time of her life.

But, then, people started dying.

*

Sue was born in Pittsburgh. Her mother worked in department stores. Her father, Robert Rihr, was in sales, everything from swimming pools to pots and pans.

Most of his time, he spent dreaming of new ideas and inventions that never materialized. He swore his family was going to have a house of its own some day and once started building one across the street from the home they rented in Pittsburgh.

It was only half-built when he packed the family up and headed west, to Phoenix, where he came upon a map to a lost gold mine, which he searched for but, of course, never found.

Meanwhile, it was Sue’s mother who was paying the rent. While he was cooking up ideas, she was often crying in the kitchen.

Their life as a family ended the Christmas Eve that Sue was 12. Her father walked into the house, which was dark except for the lights on the tree. Sue watched from a distance as he hugged his wife, told her he loved her but wanted a divorce. She turned, trying not to tremble, and went to her bedroom, quietly closing the door.

Rihr walked out, saying nothing, and there stood Sue alone with the tree.

*

Both Sue and her sister, Nancy Koch, were diagnosed with early-onset diabetes. Nancy was in and out of hospitals, never overly concerned about maintaining proper blood sugar levels.

Eventually, she lost an eye, and both legs were amputated. Her kidneys failed, and she was on dialysis for eight years.

Nancy, a year older than Sue, was a rebel who always had a way of making people laugh. Once, the shoe came off one of her prosthetic legs at her favorite bar. The bartender jokingly told her she would have to leave. No shoes, no service. So Nancy took off her leg and tossed it out the front door.

Sue was diagnosed at age 14 and had it easier. It wasn’t until she became an adult that diabetes-related complications developed.

In the meantime, she graduated from the United States International School of Performing and Visual Arts in San Diego in 1972, moved to Hollywood and immediately landed work doing television commercials.

Money was coming in left and right. But none of her relationships with men worked until she met David Gaetzman in April 1985. He was her personal trainer for a year before they began dating.

A Midwesterner, David moved to Los Angeles after graduating from the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point with a degree in dietetics and biology. He became a bodybuilder and believed strictly in holistic health practices. They married on April 25, 1987.

Prompted by the Northridge earthquake, the couple moved to Boulder, Colo., in 1994 and went to work for a company that manufactured health products. David toiled in the warehouse while Sue worked in customer service.

In 1996, David received an offer through a friend to go to Saudi Arabia and work as a personal trainer for $5,000 a month. In the month and a half he was gone, Sue put on weight. It became hard for her to breathe, and doctors said her kidneys were shutting down because of her diabetes. When David returned home for Christmas, they moved back to L.A., where, they believed, better medical treatment was available.

In April, David drove Sue to Los Angeles County Harbor-UCLA Medical Center for emergency treatment. During the examination, she asked for David. Nurses couldn’t find him, so he was paged. When there was no response, it was discovered that he had been admitted to the hospital himself.

David had asked to see a doctor because he wasn’t feeling well. Tests were done, and by the time Sue found him in another room in the ER, he had bad news. “You’re not going to like this,” he said. “They think I have cancer.”

It was tragic irony. David was always the healthy one, his muscles carefully sculpted, his diet meticulous. He was the one who cared for Sue, but suddenly it was David who was dying.

The cancer, which began in one of his kidneys, spread quickly to his lungs, and doctors said there was nothing they could do. He began coughing up blood. His muscular frame deteriorated as his weight dwindled.

“This next period is such a blur,” Sue says. “It’s the time when you think you would say your last words, but you don’t want to think that.”

The pain was so great that it hurt him to be touched, and Sue wanted so much to touch him, but she held back. During his final days, he was connected to a respirator and medicated with morphine. Unable to talk, he began communicating with Sue, his doctors and friends through writing.

“I can’t take it one minute longer.”

“I can’t breathe.”

“Kill me!”

Doctors said that David’s heart was strong and that he might live for days or weeks. The next morning, the telephone rang about 6:30. David’s vital signs were deteriorating. Ten minutes later, the telephone rang again. He was gone. David was 38 years old.

When Sue saw his body, she felt a sense of relief. His suffering had ended. He had gone on without her. “He was still warm when we got there,” she says. “Then he got cold. Then he was freezing cold.”

A strong circle of friends that would watch over Sue during the ensuing months attended the service in Santa Monica. Sue’s father drove up from Phoenix but got lost along the way and ended up at Disneyland.

*

For months after David’s death, Sue did not dream. It became difficult to even sleep. Medication to help her kidneys function was losing effectiveness, and she soon began dialysis.

At the same time, her sister Nancy was getting ready to move into a new apartment in Arizona. Ten months after David’s death, on May 16, 1998, Nancy died in her sleep with all her boxes packed. She was 44.

Sue could have continued with dialysis, hooking herself to the machine each night when she went to bed. But when given the option of a transplant, she asked to be placed on the waiting list for a pancreas and kidney.

The first attempt was canceled when she felt a cold coming on. It was almost a year before the second call came. Sue went in to be prepared for surgery but was told the organs had not been harvested in time.

The third call came soon after. Again, she went in, and again she returned home. There were signs of hepatitis in the organs. It was during this period of false runs that her father died of Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Then came the fourth call.

On April 13, 1999, Brent Adams was walking home from elementary school with his twin, Nick. The two had an ongoing contest: Nick thinking one crosswalk would get him home faster, Brent favoring another.

Nick was crossing the street when he saw a car coming and jumped back to the curb. The car swerved and went through the intersection. Brent, who was still crossing the street, was struck and killed. His mother, Toni, authorized donation of his vital organs. Within hours, the telephone rang at Sue’s home.

*

Seven months later, Toni wrote a letter to Sue. Organ donor programs maintain confidentiality and allow donor families to make contact only if authorized by the recipients. Sue had given her permission for Toni to write.

“Dear Ms. Gaetzman,” the letter began. “How are you feeling now? Better and much stronger I hope. This is about the eighth letter I’ve started but never completed. It’s difficult communicating with someone you don’t know regarding such a delicate subject. I still do not know what to say. I guess just whatever comes to mind.

“Today was Brent and Nick’s birthday. . . .”

She described how the day was spent at the cemetery, where they ate cake and released nine balloons, each carrying a message to Brent.

When she came to pick out a plot for Brent, she was shown an area at the edge of the cemetery, but she remembered how he would fall out of bed, so she picked a site closer to the middle.

Sue and Toni met in April on the opening night of “Blood Sugar,” almost a year to the day she received her transplant. It had been seven years since Sue had acted, yet she felt a calmness, a feeling she was doing what she was meant to do.

A segment about Brent was introduced by the sound of sirens, and Toni immediately clenched. In her mind, she again saw Brent’s stillness in the street and felt a stab in her heart.

Later, she and Sue, who had spoken but never met before, hugged on stage.

“It felt funny,” Toni says. “It’s like I’m sharing him with her now. I have the memories, and she has a part of him. I’d like to share some of those memories with her, just so she knows who he is as a person.” Sue is working on a screenplay stemming from the theatrical work and is writing a book as she searches for other venues to perform her play. That is part of her healing. She knows that the average life of a donated kidney is 10 years. With Brent’s pancreas, she is no longer diabetic, but she suffers side effects from anti-rejection medications. Her vision, which had deteriorated to near blindness, has improved, but her feet remain numb, and she must be careful when she walks.

Moving forward with one’s life, learning to be happy again, is hard, slow work. In “Blood Sugar,” there is no fairy-tale ending. There is only a woman left standing. The play concludes with a poem, “After Life”:

” . . . When I see how far I’ve come,

It makes me wonder where

I’m going. None of it

seems real, but all of it

sure seems possible.

It’s possible for me to live.

I just have to save myself.

That same self that

hasn’t forgotten,

not really,

how to be

happy.”

*

Duane Noriyuki can be contacted at duane.noriyuki@latimes.com.