Actor and playwright Sam Shepard passed away this week. Longtime friend and collaborator Patti Smith remembers him in her New Yorker essay My Buddy
The New Yorker have recently published Patti Smith’s article paying homage to collaborator and friend Sam Shepard, who died on 30 July from complications with ALS. The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and Oscar-nominated actor died age 73 in his Kentucky home.
Smith’s poignant tribute touches upon the details of Shepard’s life – from his tattooed hand to his love of Beckett and his fascination with travelling the landscape of the Southwest.
Known for his influential work on redefining the landscape of the American West, Smith details how Shepard would find inspiration: “He liked packing up and leaving just like that, going west. He liked getting a role that would take him somewhere he really didn’t want to be, but where he would wind up taking in its strangeness; lonely fodder for future work.”
On his death, Smith wrote: “Sam walked to his bed and lay down and went to sleep, a stoic, noble sleep. A sleep that led to an unwitnessed moment, as love surrounded him and breathed the same air.”
“Sam was a private man. I know something of such men. You have to let them dictate how things go, even to the end. The rain fell, obscuring tears. His children, Jesse, Walker, and Hannah, said goodbye to their father. His sisters Roxanne and Sandy said goodbye to their brother.”
On remembrance, the article reads: “I knew that I would see Sam again somewhere in the landscape of dream, but at that moment I imagined I was back in Kentucky, with the rolling fields and the creek that widens into a small river. I pictured Sam’s books lining the shelves, his boots lined against the wall, beneath the window where he would watch the horses grazing by the wooden fence. I pictured myself sitting at the kitchen table, reaching for that tattooed hand.”
Read My Buddy via The New Yorker.