Camilla Sabine Schade (May 2, 1952-May 24, 2019) has left the room, strafed by a brutal cancer (MMMT). Gone but hardly forgotten, as she touched and transformed countless lives.
She was born and raised on Cape Ann in Beverly, Essex, and Hamilton MA, with brothers Bill and Alan, sister Carolyn, mother Mary and father Addison.
Camilla's theater career began in high school, but her play acting originated in the woods of her childhood home in Essex. After high school came a stint at Montserrat College of Art, a solo hitchhiking trip through Europe, a banking job, and enrollment at the University of Delaware for 3 years.
In 1978, Camilla moved to Lancaster PA to work with the Independent Eye, an experimental theater company run by Conrad Bishop and Elizabeth Fuller. In 1990, she and Terri Mastrobuono started Co-Motion, a theater company that had an amazing nine-year run. Camilla wrote, directed and performed, as well as co-managed the business. She was an adjunct professor at Franklin & Marshall College and privately taught theater to children and adults. She was on stage at the Fulton Opera House many times, perhaps most memorably as the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. And never has there been a better drunken cowboy than Camilla in Parallel Lives. In her play Emily Sticksenstones about loss and hope, she channeled her inner child.
In 2004, Camilla moved to New York State and began a new life in Cayutaville. She soon began working with the Hangar Theatre's Project 4 in nearby Ithaca which puts artists in 4th grade classrooms to create plays with students and teachers. Camilla's enthusiasm was infectious and she delighted in introducing stagecraft to her young charges, especially the shy ones. Other theater teaching work included Ithaca Youth Bureau, Hangar Theatre summer camps, after school workshops, Big Brothers Big Sisters, and 171 Cedar Arts in Corning NY. Her favorite teaching work was writing and performing plays with adults with disabilities for Pathways, Inc. in Corning.
In 2010, Camilla, with Kira Lallas, wrote, produced and performed her one-woman group therapy comedy piece about depression, Performing Therapy. In it, she touched on the loss of her theater company, her upheaval moving to a new area, her father's death, and caring for her mother with Alzheimer's disease—a stunning show that highlighted all of Camilla's theatrical talents. No one could do more with a balloon.
Camilla worked with the Ithaca theater community onstage at the Hangar Theatre, Kitchen Theatre, Cinemapolis, Cherry Arts and Homecoming Players. She performed in many short plays, staged readings, radio voiceovers, and public events. She did narration for Music's Recreation and the Grass Roots Orchestra. She charmed audiences with her character Mabel McClafferty at the Cancer Resource Center's annual fundraiser, One Funny Ithaca. She even played Einstein at Cornell University.
Camilla's artistry and creativity did not end at the stage door. She was a prolific craftsperson, making quilts, wall hangings, drawings and, of course, multicolored scrubbies. She loved tending her gardens and upgrading her beloved "shackteau" in Cayutaville.
Camilla's warmth and sincere interest in others' lives made human interactions possible that were not ordinary. She would routinely light up a room with her smile and energy. We were all better people if Camilla was nearby.
Camilla leaves behind her extremely lucky husband, Bruce Fearon, her close and most loyal younger sister Carolyn Cadigan (husband Rufus) in Rockford, Illinois, her brother Bill in Seattle WA, her brother Alan in Lancaster PA, her stepson Gabe in Colorado, her stepson Cody in Ithaca, and several beloved cousins, nieces and nephews. Camilla's large community of close friends in Lancaster, Ithaca, and beyond will keep her memory alive with laughter and shared stories.
The family would like to thank Dr. TImothy Bael, his staff, the wonderful nurses/angels at Cayuga Medical Center Oncology and CareFirst Hospice, as well as the volunteers at the Cancer Resource Center.
Camilla's parting gift is her monologue about the last year of her life, entitled Bones.
A celebration of Camilla's life will be held 7 pm Monday, August 26th at the Hangar Theatre. Please honor her life with a belly laugh and a creative thought.
Information from Perkins Funeral Home
An obituary was published in The Ithaca Journal on June 5, 2019
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Camilla Schade, a longtime fixture in the Lancaster theater scene until she moved to New York state 15 years ago, died May 23 of cancer at the age of 66. Her last performance — a one-woman show, “Bones,” about her struggle with the disease — was May 4 at The Ware Center in Lancaster.
It says a lot about Lancaster that, in the last weeks of her life, Camilla Schade chose to make her final onstage appearance here, in front of beloved friends and others from the local arts community.
But it says even more about Schade, who came to Lancaster in 1978 and forged an impressive legacy in the theater scene for more than a quarter century, until she left in 2004 to join her future husband in the Ithaca, New York, area.
Lancaster made a huge impression on her — and she never forgot. She told LNP’s Jane Holahan that, despite being away for 15 years, she considered this area her theatrical home.
Barry Kornhauser, who worked with Schade at the Fulton Theatre, said this of her May 4 monologue, which was filled with as much laughter as tears: “It was a great gift to this community and to Camilla, too. She knew this was her last performance, and she wanted to do it here.”
Upon learning of her death, Kornhauser said that Schade “made a real impact on theatrical life in Lancaster. She was an equally brilliant artist and wonderful human being.”
In a Facebook post, local theater director Laura Howell wrote: “She will be missed by so many people who knew and loved her — too numerous to count. We were all made a little bit better for knowing her and loving her.”
In the late 1970s, Schade arrived in Lancaster to work with the Independent Eye, a small experimental theater company run by Conrad and Linda Bishop.
“Those were truly my apprentice years,’’ Schade said in a newspaper interview. “I got to discover what I could do.”
After the Bishops moved to Philadelphia, Schade and actress Terri Mastrobuono founded Co-Motion, a company based on movement theater, which operated from 1990 to 1998. Schade was a theatrical jack-of-all-trades — directing, writing plays and performing.
She also worked as an actor and an instructor at the Fulton, and an adjunct professor at Franklin & Marshall College, performing in the Green Room Theatre on campus.
Schade had already endured breast cancer before she was diagnosed with a rare form of ovarian cancer — a multiple malignant Mullerian tumor.
“It is aggressive and not nice,” she told Holahan. “Ovarian cancer isn’t good, but this is even worse.”
After a year and a half of chemotherapy — positive news alternating with bad news, exhaustion, anger, support, tears, love, tests and hospital visits, but all accompanied with humor — Schade was told that nothing more could be done.
In an interview with Holahan prior to her “Bones” performance in Lancaster, she said this of the autobiographical monologue: “This is just my story. Everybody has a story.”
With characteristic honesty, Schade also told LNP as she neared the end, “I am mostly scared of things like pain. I’m scared of hurting.”
She added: “I just love beauty. I am very aware of light and the light changing, of just how gorgeous and beautiful stuff is.
“But it is all mercurial, it all goes by. There is the most beautiful snowfall I’ve ever seen, and it goes away. That is the way it is. You can’t capture it.”
We agree with LNP’s Holahan, who wrote:
“She didn’t say this, but I believe Schade was leaving ‘Bones’ behind as a gift to her friends, to her family, to anyone who has to acknowledge that loss and tragedy are a part of our lives whether we are 8 and looking for our lost dog, or 66 and facing death.
“Thank you, Camilla. Thank you for having an open heart and a way of expressing that heart so beautifully.”
As the curtain goes down on Schade’s well-lived life, in which she positively impacted so many others, we will always remember how much of that life she shared — including her final act — with us.
~From an editorial published in LancasterOnline on June1, 2019
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—From EF—
Traveling can be harsh. Not so much when getting into our Prius to drive 600 miles a day to cross the country, it’s a comfy car and we have each other, but it does take stamina. On the other hand, grabbing a last-minute ticket and flying from San Francisco to Scranton, PA with a change in Charlotte (Chicago on the way back) was a symphony of Harsh. It was OK because every minute of the trip was warmed and colored by its purpose. I went to visit Camilla Schade.
Camilla is quicksilver and color, a luminous presence on stage, someone who can take a character onto a roller-coaster and bring every audience member along for the ride. Beautiful and funny, the embodiment of warmth. I flew to Scranton, drove to upstate New York, parked by their little woodland house, and went in to sit on a couch with my friend for five hours. The last embrace was the hardest, because it will have been the last one.
We met in 1975, when she was to be our newborn Johanna’s babysitter as we created a show called Knock Knock with a student cast at the University of Delaware. She wound up in the cast and we found another sitter. When we moved our theatre’s base to Lancaster PA, we asked Camilla to join us, and she did. We worked together for years, everything from Macbeth to cabaret comedy, and the stories are endless.
Five rich and beautiful hours. Some of it in silent presence, some of it giggling like schoolgirls, some of it soggy with kleenex, some of it telling funny old war stories to sister Carolyn and husband Bruce.
Warmth, color and closeness in a place of quiet beauty. The rituals of greeting and farewell, the essentials of human closeness, softness, vulnerability.
And then the grotesque circus of O’Hare airport, miles of noisy halls and beeping trollies and four-dollar water bottles. Rattle and clang under fluorescent lights, hurry up and wait, staring at the smart-phone, trying to ignore Fox on the screens. What wildly different stage sets we humans create to enclose the multiple stories of our lives. For five hours I was in a place of beauty.
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Posted by Elizabeth Fuller on DamnedFool.com, May 14, 2019. The blog is a a companion to the website of The Independent Eye, Conrad Bishop and Elizabeth Fuller's theatre ensemble now (2019) in its 43rd season.
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After only a few short minutes of talking with Camilla Schade, I had completely forgotten we were in Ithaca Bakery. I had forgotten my phone was recording our interview, and most remarkably, I had forgotten we had only met just moments before. As the time ticked on, the interview transformed into two girls simply catching up, laughing and crying over stories that were longing to be told.
Schade was first diagnosed with cancer in 2009. “I changed into a dress the day I found out,” she said. “I wanted to feel feminine. I wanted to feel pretty.” Her response did not surprise me, because she had already told me earlier about the attractive blouse she was wearing on the day of her biopsy. It was very clear to me that Camilla was not going to allow the cancer to take her beauty and her girl-ness away. “But I had accepted that I was going to lose my hair. For some reason, that didn’t bother me.” Luckily, her treatment did not cause her hair to fall out. Camilla has very long, thick hair; however she felt that she should possibly tie her hair back at support meetings. Having all of that long, flowing hair in front of people who needed wigs might have been very uncomfortable or unfair to them. “Hair is a big deal,” she said. “Hair is a really, really huge deal. I know. I love my hair.”
The biopsy was the worst part of the whole experience, she says, because she had to be awake for the entire thing. She talked about how frightening it was since there were specific moments when she wasn’t allowed to breathe. Sometimes her mind would wander and then she’d come back to consciousness in a panic over whether or not she’d taken a breath when she wasn’t supposed to. Camilla then added, “They must have thought I was really strong because they left out all the tools and bloody tubes for me to see as I left.”
When explaining her cancer, Camilla told me that it was estrogen-fed, and her doctor called it a garden variety. “Garden variety!” she scoffs. “I’m thinking ‘It’s not a garden variety cancer, it’s MY cancer!’ It got personal. “I had just gone through menopause and cancer was the cherry on top of the menopause sundae! And you can write that down!” she laughed. Also, she explained that she developed a protective gesture where she would hold her arm close to her breast. After the surgery, she felt the constant need to protect that area, and it took some time for her to let that gesture go.
However, despite all the difficulties, she did make one comment that some women might be a little surprised to hear. “I rather enjoyed hot flashes.” She puffed up and showed me her muscles. “I felt powerful. Energized.” After we shared another laugh, which seemed to be a constant theme during this interview, she told me that she was on an estrogen medication that starting tomorrow she would stop taking. She talked with her doctor, and they agreed on a healthy way to proceed. She hopes that being off the medication will help her get her “mojo” back.
Her husband stayed by her side throughout the entire process. The two of them were married in 2010, after Schade was in remission. She leaned in and told me, “This is my third marriage. I have a checkered past.” When I asked if she had any children, her eyes widened. Her inner child, she said, was so strong and loud that having a child herself wasn’t something she would be able to do.
I really do hope that Camilla finds her mojo again, because after her stories about the theatre work she’s done in the past, I can’t help but want to see her do more of it! She’s been in many theatrical productions, one of which was The Vagina Monologues. I told her I was in that show last year as well, and we realized we both had played the same role! Also, she is a playwright and told me about many different plays she has written throughout the years. All of her work sounds extremely creative, challenging, and cathartic. In 2002, before she was even diagnosed, Schade wrote a play called “Am I My Breast Cancer?” She explained how she devised the piece and collaborated with actors as well as dancers to tell a comedic allegory about a woman going through treatment. It amazed me that she wrote this before knowing that cancer was going to affect her life the way it has. Schade nodded at the irony. “I always thought ‘I’m not getting cancer. I couldn’t get cancer.” Camilla went on to tell me there was no real cancer in her family, and she had no known risk factors. “Nowadays it feels like anyone can have it,” she says. “Like it’s something you come down with. ‘I came down with cancer.'”
Camilla described her final surgery in a very theatrical way. When she said goodbye to her husband before they took her to the operating room, she said she really thought she was going to die. A friend had prepared her for what the operating room would look like. Without the warning it would have been that much more difficult and horrifying. As they wheeled her back, she noticed the walls getting plain. The hallway became bigger and wider. Finally when she arrived in in the operating room, it was a cavernous with all of these “alien machines” beaming down at her. All she remembers after that was getting put under anesthesia and then waking up in extreme pain. “Look, I loved that anesthesia. You can knock me out like that whenever you want!”
After the surgery she did follow up radiation therapy in Elmira. Since she went so frequently, she found a social group there in the waiting room, sharing cancer stories while working jigsaw puzzles. However, when her radiation therapy was no longer needed, she felt like she had lost her connection. That’s when she found the Cancer Resource Center. Bob Riter was her first contact. She started to attend meetings at the Cancer Resource Center and found a really strong and supportive community there. The two of us discussed how the center had such a safe and welcoming atmosphere. Camilla told me she tries to go to the weekly Friday brownbag group, as well as participating in CRC events, including the spring retreats, lectures, yoga and walkathon. She described the center as an extraordinary support – creative and open.
As the interview came to a close, Camilla and I talked about meeting again to continue discussing theater. In the future, she hopes to transform her experience into something theatrical and share it through the Cancer Resource Center. It was an absolute pleasure meeting and talking with Camilla, and I expect to see great things from her in the days to come.
Posted by Siona Stone on The Cancer Resource Center of the Finger Lakes website on February 12, 2015
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It’s been 15 years since Camilla Schade left Lancaster for Ithaca, New York.
Love took the actress away. She started seeing a man she “kind of dated” back in high school, they fell in love and were married on their front lawn in 2010.
“We all wore red noses,” Schade remembers with a laugh.
The actress delighted and transfixed Lancaster theater audiences, young and old, for decades, first with her work at the Independent Eye and then at Co-Motion, a theater company she ran with Terri Mastrobuono.
She acted at Fulton Theatre and Franklin & Marshall College. She wrote her own plays and taught theater to children and F&M students for many years.
“It was heartbreaking to leave Lancaster,” she said during a recent phone interview.
Her return here Saturday will be heartbreaking as well. Schade will be performing “Bones,” an extended monologue she has written, at 7 p.m. at the Ware Center.
“I will be reading about my last year with cancer and my travels through that,” Schade says. “A lot about thinking about death.”
Schade had done battle with breast cancer in 2009 and beat it.
This time, things are different.
She has a rare form of ovarian cancer called a multiple malignant mullarian tumor.
“It is aggressive and not nice,” she says. “Ovarian cancer isn’t good, but this is even worse.”
After 15 months of chemo, positive news followed by bad news, exhaustion, anger, support, tears, love, endless tests and hospital visits — fueled all along with humor — nothing more can be done.
It is time to face her mortality, to figure out what to do with all her stuff, say goodbye and make us laugh with her one more time.
“This is just my story. Everybody has a story,” Schade says. “I am struck by the banality of my life, the things I never got to do. I was never a great adventurer. I had that image of myself, but I am not.”
What Schade always has been is a storyteller, a good one and a funny one.
She started writing about her cancer journey with Kira Lallas, a playwright she worked with when she first moved to Ithaca.
As the story turned darker, she decided to keep going.
She does not want it to be a slog or a dirge. She has too much life for that.
“I keep telling Kira this isn’t funny enough. It’s bad when I can’t hook into my sense of humor.”....
“I have this insistent inner child, and when I feel like I am not in contact with that, I know I am pretty depressed,” she says. “But laughing literally hurts.”
Is she worried about such personal material overwhelming her?
“I am really hoping my performance self can take over. I am not trying to work something out on stage. I want the audience to have it, not me.”
....Schade first knew something was wrong in October 2017.
“I got a cold and I couldn’t get rid of it. I took antibiotics, but they didn’t work. Finally, I was having a terrible time breathing in rehearsals for a show. I got an X-ray.”
The X-ray showed that her lung lining was full of liquid.
After having a half gallon of liquid sucked out of her lungs (“It looked like a good IPA,” she says with a chuckle), she felt totally depleted.
A week later, she went to the doctor.
“He takes both my hands and says ‘You have cancer. Cancer cells were floating through all that liquid.’ ”
The official diagnosis was a multiple malignant mullarian tumor.
Worried about the holiday show called “The Snow Queen” for which she was rehearsing, Schade asked if they could delay treatment until the end of December.
“Onstage, I was a tour de force, but offstage I’d back into the walls and hang on,” she recalls. One day, she couldn’t continue.
“In between shows, with me in tears, my husband took me to the ER. There was a blood clot in my lungs, filled with liquid again.”
She started chemo.
“You lose your hair, including your nose hair, so your nose drips all the time,” Schade says. “You look like a plucked chicken.”
The chemo felt like an onslaught.
“You are trading out your blood for something unearthly. You feel like an alien,” she says. “And you just feel sad.”
....Schade did all the things her doctors deemed necessary. Sometimes, there was a flicker of hope. She’d end one therapy and then begin a different one. But ultimately, after more than a year of fighting, they told her there was no more they could do. She was going to die.
“My first thought was ‘Moi? That’s impossible.’ I am 66 years old, I am very active teaching and performing, I have a lot going on.”
Cancer had ruled her life. Now, she thought of death.
“I was fixating on death images. One day, when I was driving down the road, this huge bird was right in front of me flying. And as it spun off, I realized it was a turkey vulture. What more obvious harbinger of death could there be? Then I began seeing them everywhere.”
She wondered what to do with all the stuff she had accumulated in her life.
Friends were supportive. One group of young women she calls The Coven has been there for her from the beginning.
She doesn’t want to hear about how we are all going to die some day. People who say that usually aren’t dealing with the here and now.
And she doesn’t want to be told to think positively.
“Sometimes I’m just pissed off and resentful of the whole thing,” Schade says. “I am mostly scared of things like pain, I’m scared of hurting.”
She is also seeing the beauty in the world in a way she never has before.
“I just love beauty. I am very aware of light and the light changing, of just how gorgeous and beautiful stuff is.
“But it is all mercurial, it all goes by. There is the most beautiful snowfall I’ve ever seen, and it goes away. That is the way it is. You can’t capture it.”
Excerpted from "Camilla Schade's final act: Facing death, theater icon plans one-woman show, 'Bones'" (J. Holahan) posted on LancasterOnline on Apr 28, 2019
She was born and raised on Cape Ann in Beverly, Essex, and Hamilton MA, with brothers Bill and Alan, sister Carolyn, mother Mary and father Addison.
Camilla's theater career began in high school, but her play acting originated in the woods of her childhood home in Essex. After high school came a stint at Montserrat College of Art, a solo hitchhiking trip through Europe, a banking job, and enrollment at the University of Delaware for 3 years.
In 1978, Camilla moved to Lancaster PA to work with the Independent Eye, an experimental theater company run by Conrad Bishop and Elizabeth Fuller. In 1990, she and Terri Mastrobuono started Co-Motion, a theater company that had an amazing nine-year run. Camilla wrote, directed and performed, as well as co-managed the business. She was an adjunct professor at Franklin & Marshall College and privately taught theater to children and adults. She was on stage at the Fulton Opera House many times, perhaps most memorably as the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. And never has there been a better drunken cowboy than Camilla in Parallel Lives. In her play Emily Sticksenstones about loss and hope, she channeled her inner child.
In 2004, Camilla moved to New York State and began a new life in Cayutaville. She soon began working with the Hangar Theatre's Project 4 in nearby Ithaca which puts artists in 4th grade classrooms to create plays with students and teachers. Camilla's enthusiasm was infectious and she delighted in introducing stagecraft to her young charges, especially the shy ones. Other theater teaching work included Ithaca Youth Bureau, Hangar Theatre summer camps, after school workshops, Big Brothers Big Sisters, and 171 Cedar Arts in Corning NY. Her favorite teaching work was writing and performing plays with adults with disabilities for Pathways, Inc. in Corning.
In 2010, Camilla, with Kira Lallas, wrote, produced and performed her one-woman group therapy comedy piece about depression, Performing Therapy. In it, she touched on the loss of her theater company, her upheaval moving to a new area, her father's death, and caring for her mother with Alzheimer's disease—a stunning show that highlighted all of Camilla's theatrical talents. No one could do more with a balloon.
Camilla worked with the Ithaca theater community onstage at the Hangar Theatre, Kitchen Theatre, Cinemapolis, Cherry Arts and Homecoming Players. She performed in many short plays, staged readings, radio voiceovers, and public events. She did narration for Music's Recreation and the Grass Roots Orchestra. She charmed audiences with her character Mabel McClafferty at the Cancer Resource Center's annual fundraiser, One Funny Ithaca. She even played Einstein at Cornell University.
Camilla's artistry and creativity did not end at the stage door. She was a prolific craftsperson, making quilts, wall hangings, drawings and, of course, multicolored scrubbies. She loved tending her gardens and upgrading her beloved "shackteau" in Cayutaville.
Camilla's warmth and sincere interest in others' lives made human interactions possible that were not ordinary. She would routinely light up a room with her smile and energy. We were all better people if Camilla was nearby.
Camilla leaves behind her extremely lucky husband, Bruce Fearon, her close and most loyal younger sister Carolyn Cadigan (husband Rufus) in Rockford, Illinois, her brother Bill in Seattle WA, her brother Alan in Lancaster PA, her stepson Gabe in Colorado, her stepson Cody in Ithaca, and several beloved cousins, nieces and nephews. Camilla's large community of close friends in Lancaster, Ithaca, and beyond will keep her memory alive with laughter and shared stories.
The family would like to thank Dr. TImothy Bael, his staff, the wonderful nurses/angels at Cayuga Medical Center Oncology and CareFirst Hospice, as well as the volunteers at the Cancer Resource Center.
Camilla's parting gift is her monologue about the last year of her life, entitled Bones.
A celebration of Camilla's life will be held 7 pm Monday, August 26th at the Hangar Theatre. Please honor her life with a belly laugh and a creative thought.
Information from Perkins Funeral Home
An obituary was published in The Ithaca Journal on June 5, 2019
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Camilla Schade, a longtime fixture in the Lancaster theater scene until she moved to New York state 15 years ago, died May 23 of cancer at the age of 66. Her last performance — a one-woman show, “Bones,” about her struggle with the disease — was May 4 at The Ware Center in Lancaster.
It says a lot about Lancaster that, in the last weeks of her life, Camilla Schade chose to make her final onstage appearance here, in front of beloved friends and others from the local arts community.
But it says even more about Schade, who came to Lancaster in 1978 and forged an impressive legacy in the theater scene for more than a quarter century, until she left in 2004 to join her future husband in the Ithaca, New York, area.
Lancaster made a huge impression on her — and she never forgot. She told LNP’s Jane Holahan that, despite being away for 15 years, she considered this area her theatrical home.
Barry Kornhauser, who worked with Schade at the Fulton Theatre, said this of her May 4 monologue, which was filled with as much laughter as tears: “It was a great gift to this community and to Camilla, too. She knew this was her last performance, and she wanted to do it here.”
Upon learning of her death, Kornhauser said that Schade “made a real impact on theatrical life in Lancaster. She was an equally brilliant artist and wonderful human being.”
In a Facebook post, local theater director Laura Howell wrote: “She will be missed by so many people who knew and loved her — too numerous to count. We were all made a little bit better for knowing her and loving her.”
In the late 1970s, Schade arrived in Lancaster to work with the Independent Eye, a small experimental theater company run by Conrad and Linda Bishop.
“Those were truly my apprentice years,’’ Schade said in a newspaper interview. “I got to discover what I could do.”
After the Bishops moved to Philadelphia, Schade and actress Terri Mastrobuono founded Co-Motion, a company based on movement theater, which operated from 1990 to 1998. Schade was a theatrical jack-of-all-trades — directing, writing plays and performing.
She also worked as an actor and an instructor at the Fulton, and an adjunct professor at Franklin & Marshall College, performing in the Green Room Theatre on campus.
Schade had already endured breast cancer before she was diagnosed with a rare form of ovarian cancer — a multiple malignant Mullerian tumor.
“It is aggressive and not nice,” she told Holahan. “Ovarian cancer isn’t good, but this is even worse.”
After a year and a half of chemotherapy — positive news alternating with bad news, exhaustion, anger, support, tears, love, tests and hospital visits, but all accompanied with humor — Schade was told that nothing more could be done.
In an interview with Holahan prior to her “Bones” performance in Lancaster, she said this of the autobiographical monologue: “This is just my story. Everybody has a story.”
With characteristic honesty, Schade also told LNP as she neared the end, “I am mostly scared of things like pain. I’m scared of hurting.”
She added: “I just love beauty. I am very aware of light and the light changing, of just how gorgeous and beautiful stuff is.
“But it is all mercurial, it all goes by. There is the most beautiful snowfall I’ve ever seen, and it goes away. That is the way it is. You can’t capture it.”
We agree with LNP’s Holahan, who wrote:
“She didn’t say this, but I believe Schade was leaving ‘Bones’ behind as a gift to her friends, to her family, to anyone who has to acknowledge that loss and tragedy are a part of our lives whether we are 8 and looking for our lost dog, or 66 and facing death.
“Thank you, Camilla. Thank you for having an open heart and a way of expressing that heart so beautifully.”
As the curtain goes down on Schade’s well-lived life, in which she positively impacted so many others, we will always remember how much of that life she shared — including her final act — with us.
~From an editorial published in LancasterOnline on June1, 2019
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
—From EF—
Traveling can be harsh. Not so much when getting into our Prius to drive 600 miles a day to cross the country, it’s a comfy car and we have each other, but it does take stamina. On the other hand, grabbing a last-minute ticket and flying from San Francisco to Scranton, PA with a change in Charlotte (Chicago on the way back) was a symphony of Harsh. It was OK because every minute of the trip was warmed and colored by its purpose. I went to visit Camilla Schade.
Camilla is quicksilver and color, a luminous presence on stage, someone who can take a character onto a roller-coaster and bring every audience member along for the ride. Beautiful and funny, the embodiment of warmth. I flew to Scranton, drove to upstate New York, parked by their little woodland house, and went in to sit on a couch with my friend for five hours. The last embrace was the hardest, because it will have been the last one.
We met in 1975, when she was to be our newborn Johanna’s babysitter as we created a show called Knock Knock with a student cast at the University of Delaware. She wound up in the cast and we found another sitter. When we moved our theatre’s base to Lancaster PA, we asked Camilla to join us, and she did. We worked together for years, everything from Macbeth to cabaret comedy, and the stories are endless.
Five rich and beautiful hours. Some of it in silent presence, some of it giggling like schoolgirls, some of it soggy with kleenex, some of it telling funny old war stories to sister Carolyn and husband Bruce.
Warmth, color and closeness in a place of quiet beauty. The rituals of greeting and farewell, the essentials of human closeness, softness, vulnerability.
And then the grotesque circus of O’Hare airport, miles of noisy halls and beeping trollies and four-dollar water bottles. Rattle and clang under fluorescent lights, hurry up and wait, staring at the smart-phone, trying to ignore Fox on the screens. What wildly different stage sets we humans create to enclose the multiple stories of our lives. For five hours I was in a place of beauty.
###
Posted by Elizabeth Fuller on DamnedFool.com, May 14, 2019. The blog is a a companion to the website of The Independent Eye, Conrad Bishop and Elizabeth Fuller's theatre ensemble now (2019) in its 43rd season.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
After only a few short minutes of talking with Camilla Schade, I had completely forgotten we were in Ithaca Bakery. I had forgotten my phone was recording our interview, and most remarkably, I had forgotten we had only met just moments before. As the time ticked on, the interview transformed into two girls simply catching up, laughing and crying over stories that were longing to be told.
Schade was first diagnosed with cancer in 2009. “I changed into a dress the day I found out,” she said. “I wanted to feel feminine. I wanted to feel pretty.” Her response did not surprise me, because she had already told me earlier about the attractive blouse she was wearing on the day of her biopsy. It was very clear to me that Camilla was not going to allow the cancer to take her beauty and her girl-ness away. “But I had accepted that I was going to lose my hair. For some reason, that didn’t bother me.” Luckily, her treatment did not cause her hair to fall out. Camilla has very long, thick hair; however she felt that she should possibly tie her hair back at support meetings. Having all of that long, flowing hair in front of people who needed wigs might have been very uncomfortable or unfair to them. “Hair is a big deal,” she said. “Hair is a really, really huge deal. I know. I love my hair.”
The biopsy was the worst part of the whole experience, she says, because she had to be awake for the entire thing. She talked about how frightening it was since there were specific moments when she wasn’t allowed to breathe. Sometimes her mind would wander and then she’d come back to consciousness in a panic over whether or not she’d taken a breath when she wasn’t supposed to. Camilla then added, “They must have thought I was really strong because they left out all the tools and bloody tubes for me to see as I left.”
When explaining her cancer, Camilla told me that it was estrogen-fed, and her doctor called it a garden variety. “Garden variety!” she scoffs. “I’m thinking ‘It’s not a garden variety cancer, it’s MY cancer!’ It got personal. “I had just gone through menopause and cancer was the cherry on top of the menopause sundae! And you can write that down!” she laughed. Also, she explained that she developed a protective gesture where she would hold her arm close to her breast. After the surgery, she felt the constant need to protect that area, and it took some time for her to let that gesture go.
However, despite all the difficulties, she did make one comment that some women might be a little surprised to hear. “I rather enjoyed hot flashes.” She puffed up and showed me her muscles. “I felt powerful. Energized.” After we shared another laugh, which seemed to be a constant theme during this interview, she told me that she was on an estrogen medication that starting tomorrow she would stop taking. She talked with her doctor, and they agreed on a healthy way to proceed. She hopes that being off the medication will help her get her “mojo” back.
Her husband stayed by her side throughout the entire process. The two of them were married in 2010, after Schade was in remission. She leaned in and told me, “This is my third marriage. I have a checkered past.” When I asked if she had any children, her eyes widened. Her inner child, she said, was so strong and loud that having a child herself wasn’t something she would be able to do.
I really do hope that Camilla finds her mojo again, because after her stories about the theatre work she’s done in the past, I can’t help but want to see her do more of it! She’s been in many theatrical productions, one of which was The Vagina Monologues. I told her I was in that show last year as well, and we realized we both had played the same role! Also, she is a playwright and told me about many different plays she has written throughout the years. All of her work sounds extremely creative, challenging, and cathartic. In 2002, before she was even diagnosed, Schade wrote a play called “Am I My Breast Cancer?” She explained how she devised the piece and collaborated with actors as well as dancers to tell a comedic allegory about a woman going through treatment. It amazed me that she wrote this before knowing that cancer was going to affect her life the way it has. Schade nodded at the irony. “I always thought ‘I’m not getting cancer. I couldn’t get cancer.” Camilla went on to tell me there was no real cancer in her family, and she had no known risk factors. “Nowadays it feels like anyone can have it,” she says. “Like it’s something you come down with. ‘I came down with cancer.'”
Camilla described her final surgery in a very theatrical way. When she said goodbye to her husband before they took her to the operating room, she said she really thought she was going to die. A friend had prepared her for what the operating room would look like. Without the warning it would have been that much more difficult and horrifying. As they wheeled her back, she noticed the walls getting plain. The hallway became bigger and wider. Finally when she arrived in in the operating room, it was a cavernous with all of these “alien machines” beaming down at her. All she remembers after that was getting put under anesthesia and then waking up in extreme pain. “Look, I loved that anesthesia. You can knock me out like that whenever you want!”
After the surgery she did follow up radiation therapy in Elmira. Since she went so frequently, she found a social group there in the waiting room, sharing cancer stories while working jigsaw puzzles. However, when her radiation therapy was no longer needed, she felt like she had lost her connection. That’s when she found the Cancer Resource Center. Bob Riter was her first contact. She started to attend meetings at the Cancer Resource Center and found a really strong and supportive community there. The two of us discussed how the center had such a safe and welcoming atmosphere. Camilla told me she tries to go to the weekly Friday brownbag group, as well as participating in CRC events, including the spring retreats, lectures, yoga and walkathon. She described the center as an extraordinary support – creative and open.
As the interview came to a close, Camilla and I talked about meeting again to continue discussing theater. In the future, she hopes to transform her experience into something theatrical and share it through the Cancer Resource Center. It was an absolute pleasure meeting and talking with Camilla, and I expect to see great things from her in the days to come.
Posted by Siona Stone on The Cancer Resource Center of the Finger Lakes website on February 12, 2015
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It’s been 15 years since Camilla Schade left Lancaster for Ithaca, New York.
Love took the actress away. She started seeing a man she “kind of dated” back in high school, they fell in love and were married on their front lawn in 2010.
“We all wore red noses,” Schade remembers with a laugh.
The actress delighted and transfixed Lancaster theater audiences, young and old, for decades, first with her work at the Independent Eye and then at Co-Motion, a theater company she ran with Terri Mastrobuono.
She acted at Fulton Theatre and Franklin & Marshall College. She wrote her own plays and taught theater to children and F&M students for many years.
“It was heartbreaking to leave Lancaster,” she said during a recent phone interview.
Her return here Saturday will be heartbreaking as well. Schade will be performing “Bones,” an extended monologue she has written, at 7 p.m. at the Ware Center.
“I will be reading about my last year with cancer and my travels through that,” Schade says. “A lot about thinking about death.”
Schade had done battle with breast cancer in 2009 and beat it.
This time, things are different.
She has a rare form of ovarian cancer called a multiple malignant mullarian tumor.
“It is aggressive and not nice,” she says. “Ovarian cancer isn’t good, but this is even worse.”
After 15 months of chemo, positive news followed by bad news, exhaustion, anger, support, tears, love, endless tests and hospital visits — fueled all along with humor — nothing more can be done.
It is time to face her mortality, to figure out what to do with all her stuff, say goodbye and make us laugh with her one more time.
“This is just my story. Everybody has a story,” Schade says. “I am struck by the banality of my life, the things I never got to do. I was never a great adventurer. I had that image of myself, but I am not.”
What Schade always has been is a storyteller, a good one and a funny one.
She started writing about her cancer journey with Kira Lallas, a playwright she worked with when she first moved to Ithaca.
As the story turned darker, she decided to keep going.
She does not want it to be a slog or a dirge. She has too much life for that.
“I keep telling Kira this isn’t funny enough. It’s bad when I can’t hook into my sense of humor.”....
“I have this insistent inner child, and when I feel like I am not in contact with that, I know I am pretty depressed,” she says. “But laughing literally hurts.”
Is she worried about such personal material overwhelming her?
“I am really hoping my performance self can take over. I am not trying to work something out on stage. I want the audience to have it, not me.”
....Schade first knew something was wrong in October 2017.
“I got a cold and I couldn’t get rid of it. I took antibiotics, but they didn’t work. Finally, I was having a terrible time breathing in rehearsals for a show. I got an X-ray.”
The X-ray showed that her lung lining was full of liquid.
After having a half gallon of liquid sucked out of her lungs (“It looked like a good IPA,” she says with a chuckle), she felt totally depleted.
A week later, she went to the doctor.
“He takes both my hands and says ‘You have cancer. Cancer cells were floating through all that liquid.’ ”
The official diagnosis was a multiple malignant mullarian tumor.
Worried about the holiday show called “The Snow Queen” for which she was rehearsing, Schade asked if they could delay treatment until the end of December.
“Onstage, I was a tour de force, but offstage I’d back into the walls and hang on,” she recalls. One day, she couldn’t continue.
“In between shows, with me in tears, my husband took me to the ER. There was a blood clot in my lungs, filled with liquid again.”
She started chemo.
“You lose your hair, including your nose hair, so your nose drips all the time,” Schade says. “You look like a plucked chicken.”
The chemo felt like an onslaught.
“You are trading out your blood for something unearthly. You feel like an alien,” she says. “And you just feel sad.”
....Schade did all the things her doctors deemed necessary. Sometimes, there was a flicker of hope. She’d end one therapy and then begin a different one. But ultimately, after more than a year of fighting, they told her there was no more they could do. She was going to die.
“My first thought was ‘Moi? That’s impossible.’ I am 66 years old, I am very active teaching and performing, I have a lot going on.”
Cancer had ruled her life. Now, she thought of death.
“I was fixating on death images. One day, when I was driving down the road, this huge bird was right in front of me flying. And as it spun off, I realized it was a turkey vulture. What more obvious harbinger of death could there be? Then I began seeing them everywhere.”
She wondered what to do with all the stuff she had accumulated in her life.
Friends were supportive. One group of young women she calls The Coven has been there for her from the beginning.
She doesn’t want to hear about how we are all going to die some day. People who say that usually aren’t dealing with the here and now.
And she doesn’t want to be told to think positively.
“Sometimes I’m just pissed off and resentful of the whole thing,” Schade says. “I am mostly scared of things like pain, I’m scared of hurting.”
She is also seeing the beauty in the world in a way she never has before.
“I just love beauty. I am very aware of light and the light changing, of just how gorgeous and beautiful stuff is.
“But it is all mercurial, it all goes by. There is the most beautiful snowfall I’ve ever seen, and it goes away. That is the way it is. You can’t capture it.”
Excerpted from "Camilla Schade's final act: Facing death, theater icon plans one-woman show, 'Bones'" (J. Holahan) posted on LancasterOnline on Apr 28, 2019
Camilla Sabine Schade (May 2, 1952-May 24, 2019) has left the room, strafed by a brutal cancer (MMMT). Gone but hardly forgotten, as she touched and transformed countless lives.
She was born and raised on Cape Ann in Beverly, Essex, and Hamilton MA, with brothers Bill and Alan, sister Carolyn, mother Mary and father Addison.
Camilla's theater career began in high school, but her play acting originated in the woods of her childhood home in Essex. After high school came a stint at Montserrat College of Art, a solo hitchhiking trip through Europe, a banking job, and enrollment at the University of Delaware for 3 years.
In 1978, Camilla moved to Lancaster PA to work with the Independent Eye, an experimental theater company run by Conrad Bishop and Elizabeth Fuller. In 1990, she and Terri Mastrobuono started Co-Motion, a theater company that had an amazing nine-year run. Camilla wrote, directed and performed, as well as co-managed the business. She was an adjunct professor at Franklin & Marshall College and privately taught theater to children and adults. She was on stage at the Fulton Opera House many times, perhaps most memorably as the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. And never has there been a better drunken cowboy than Camilla in Parallel Lives. In her play Emily Sticksenstones about loss and hope, she channeled her inner child.
In 2004, Camilla moved to New York State and began a new life in Cayutaville. She soon began working with the Hangar Theatre's Project 4 in nearby Ithaca which puts artists in 4th grade classrooms to create plays with students and teachers. Camilla's enthusiasm was infectious and she delighted in introducing stagecraft to her young charges, especially the shy ones. Other theater teaching work included Ithaca Youth Bureau, Hangar Theatre summer camps, after school workshops, Big Brothers Big Sisters, and 171 Cedar Arts in Corning NY. Her favorite teaching work was writing and performing plays with adults with disabilities for Pathways, Inc. in Corning.
In 2010, Camilla, with Kira Lallas, wrote, produced and performed her one-woman group therapy comedy piece about depression, Performing Therapy. In it, she touched on the loss of her theater company, her upheaval moving to a new area, her father's death, and caring for her mother with Alzheimer's disease—a stunning show that highlighted all of Camilla's theatrical talents. No one could do more with a balloon.
Camilla worked with the Ithaca theater community onstage at the Hangar Theatre, Kitchen Theatre, Cinemapolis, Cherry Arts and Homecoming Players. She performed in many short plays, staged readings, radio voiceovers, and public events. She did narration for Music's Recreation and the Grass Roots Orchestra. She charmed audiences with her character Mabel McClafferty at the Cancer Resource Center's annual fundraiser, One Funny Ithaca. She even played Einstein at Cornell University.
Camilla's artistry and creativity did not end at the stage door. She was a prolific craftsperson, making quilts, wall hangings, drawings and, of course, multicolored scrubbies. She loved tending her gardens and upgrading her beloved "shackteau" in Cayutaville.
Camilla's warmth and sincere interest in others' lives made human interactions possible that were not ordinary. She would routinely light up a room with her smile and energy. We were all better people if Camilla was nearby.
Camilla leaves behind her extremely lucky husband, Bruce Fearon, her close and most loyal younger sister Carolyn Cadigan (husband Rufus) in Rockford, Illinois, her brother Bill in Seattle WA, her brother Alan in Lancaster PA, her stepson Gabe in Colorado, her stepson Cody in Ithaca, and several beloved cousins, nieces and nephews. Camilla's large community of close friends in Lancaster, Ithaca, and beyond will keep her memory alive with laughter and shared stories.
The family would like to thank Dr. TImothy Bael, his staff, the wonderful nurses/angels at Cayuga Medical Center Oncology and CareFirst Hospice, as well as the volunteers at the Cancer Resource Center.
Camilla's parting gift is her monologue about the last year of her life, entitled Bones.
A celebration of Camilla's life will be held 7 pm Monday, August 26th at the Hangar Theatre. Please honor her life with a belly laugh and a creative thought.
Information from Perkins Funeral Home
An obituary was published in The Ithaca Journal on June 5, 2019
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Camilla Schade, a longtime fixture in the Lancaster theater scene until she moved to New York state 15 years ago, died May 23 of cancer at the age of 66. Her last performance — a one-woman show, “Bones,” about her struggle with the disease — was May 4 at The Ware Center in Lancaster.
It says a lot about Lancaster that, in the last weeks of her life, Camilla Schade chose to make her final onstage appearance here, in front of beloved friends and others from the local arts community.
But it says even more about Schade, who came to Lancaster in 1978 and forged an impressive legacy in the theater scene for more than a quarter century, until she left in 2004 to join her future husband in the Ithaca, New York, area.
Lancaster made a huge impression on her — and she never forgot. She told LNP’s Jane Holahan that, despite being away for 15 years, she considered this area her theatrical home.
Barry Kornhauser, who worked with Schade at the Fulton Theatre, said this of her May 4 monologue, which was filled with as much laughter as tears: “It was a great gift to this community and to Camilla, too. She knew this was her last performance, and she wanted to do it here.”
Upon learning of her death, Kornhauser said that Schade “made a real impact on theatrical life in Lancaster. She was an equally brilliant artist and wonderful human being.”
In a Facebook post, local theater director Laura Howell wrote: “She will be missed by so many people who knew and loved her — too numerous to count. We were all made a little bit better for knowing her and loving her.”
In the late 1970s, Schade arrived in Lancaster to work with the Independent Eye, a small experimental theater company run by Conrad and Linda Bishop.
“Those were truly my apprentice years,’’ Schade said in a newspaper interview. “I got to discover what I could do.”
After the Bishops moved to Philadelphia, Schade and actress Terri Mastrobuono founded Co-Motion, a company based on movement theater, which operated from 1990 to 1998. Schade was a theatrical jack-of-all-trades — directing, writing plays and performing.
She also worked as an actor and an instructor at the Fulton, and an adjunct professor at Franklin & Marshall College, performing in the Green Room Theatre on campus.
Schade had already endured breast cancer before she was diagnosed with a rare form of ovarian cancer — a multiple malignant Mullerian tumor.
“It is aggressive and not nice,” she told Holahan. “Ovarian cancer isn’t good, but this is even worse.”
After a year and a half of chemotherapy — positive news alternating with bad news, exhaustion, anger, support, tears, love, tests and hospital visits, but all accompanied with humor — Schade was told that nothing more could be done.
In an interview with Holahan prior to her “Bones” performance in Lancaster, she said this of the autobiographical monologue: “This is just my story. Everybody has a story.”
With characteristic honesty, Schade also told LNP as she neared the end, “I am mostly scared of things like pain. I’m scared of hurting.”
She added: “I just love beauty. I am very aware of light and the light changing, of just how gorgeous and beautiful stuff is.
“But it is all mercurial, it all goes by. There is the most beautiful snowfall I’ve ever seen, and it goes away. That is the way it is. You can’t capture it.”
We agree with LNP’s Holahan, who wrote:
“She didn’t say this, but I believe Schade was leaving ‘Bones’ behind as a gift to her friends, to her family, to anyone who has to acknowledge that loss and tragedy are a part of our lives whether we are 8 and looking for our lost dog, or 66 and facing death.
“Thank you, Camilla. Thank you for having an open heart and a way of expressing that heart so beautifully.”
As the curtain goes down on Schade’s well-lived life, in which she positively impacted so many others, we will always remember how much of that life she shared — including her final act — with us.
~From an editorial published in LancasterOnline on June1, 2019
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—From EF—
Traveling can be harsh. Not so much when getting into our Prius to drive 600 miles a day to cross the country, it’s a comfy car and we have each other, but it does take stamina. On the other hand, grabbing a last-minute ticket and flying from San Francisco to Scranton, PA with a change in Charlotte (Chicago on the way back) was a symphony of Harsh. It was OK because every minute of the trip was warmed and colored by its purpose. I went to visit Camilla Schade.
Camilla is quicksilver and color, a luminous presence on stage, someone who can take a character onto a roller-coaster and bring every audience member along for the ride. Beautiful and funny, the embodiment of warmth. I flew to Scranton, drove to upstate New York, parked by their little woodland house, and went in to sit on a couch with my friend for five hours. The last embrace was the hardest, because it will have been the last one.
We met in 1975, when she was to be our newborn Johanna’s babysitter as we created a show called Knock Knock with a student cast at the University of Delaware. She wound up in the cast and we found another sitter. When we moved our theatre’s base to Lancaster PA, we asked Camilla to join us, and she did. We worked together for years, everything from Macbeth to cabaret comedy, and the stories are endless.
Five rich and beautiful hours. Some of it in silent presence, some of it giggling like schoolgirls, some of it soggy with kleenex, some of it telling funny old war stories to sister Carolyn and husband Bruce.
Warmth, color and closeness in a place of quiet beauty. The rituals of greeting and farewell, the essentials of human closeness, softness, vulnerability.
And then the grotesque circus of O’Hare airport, miles of noisy halls and beeping trollies and four-dollar water bottles. Rattle and clang under fluorescent lights, hurry up and wait, staring at the smart-phone, trying to ignore Fox on the screens. What wildly different stage sets we humans create to enclose the multiple stories of our lives. For five hours I was in a place of beauty.
###
Posted by Elizabeth Fuller on DamnedFool.com, May 14, 2019. The blog is a a companion to the website of The Independent Eye, Conrad Bishop and Elizabeth Fuller's theatre ensemble now (2019) in its 43rd season.
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After only a few short minutes of talking with Camilla Schade, I had completely forgotten we were in Ithaca Bakery. I had forgotten my phone was recording our interview, and most remarkably, I had forgotten we had only met just moments before. As the time ticked on, the interview transformed into two girls simply catching up, laughing and crying over stories that were longing to be told.
Schade was first diagnosed with cancer in 2009. “I changed into a dress the day I found out,” she said. “I wanted to feel feminine. I wanted to feel pretty.” Her response did not surprise me, because she had already told me earlier about the attractive blouse she was wearing on the day of her biopsy. It was very clear to me that Camilla was not going to allow the cancer to take her beauty and her girl-ness away. “But I had accepted that I was going to lose my hair. For some reason, that didn’t bother me.” Luckily, her treatment did not cause her hair to fall out. Camilla has very long, thick hair; however she felt that she should possibly tie her hair back at support meetings. Having all of that long, flowing hair in front of people who needed wigs might have been very uncomfortable or unfair to them. “Hair is a big deal,” she said. “Hair is a really, really huge deal. I know. I love my hair.”
The biopsy was the worst part of the whole experience, she says, because she had to be awake for the entire thing. She talked about how frightening it was since there were specific moments when she wasn’t allowed to breathe. Sometimes her mind would wander and then she’d come back to consciousness in a panic over whether or not she’d taken a breath when she wasn’t supposed to. Camilla then added, “They must have thought I was really strong because they left out all the tools and bloody tubes for me to see as I left.”
When explaining her cancer, Camilla told me that it was estrogen-fed, and her doctor called it a garden variety. “Garden variety!” she scoffs. “I’m thinking ‘It’s not a garden variety cancer, it’s MY cancer!’ It got personal. “I had just gone through menopause and cancer was the cherry on top of the menopause sundae! And you can write that down!” she laughed. Also, she explained that she developed a protective gesture where she would hold her arm close to her breast. After the surgery, she felt the constant need to protect that area, and it took some time for her to let that gesture go.
However, despite all the difficulties, she did make one comment that some women might be a little surprised to hear. “I rather enjoyed hot flashes.” She puffed up and showed me her muscles. “I felt powerful. Energized.” After we shared another laugh, which seemed to be a constant theme during this interview, she told me that she was on an estrogen medication that starting tomorrow she would stop taking. She talked with her doctor, and they agreed on a healthy way to proceed. She hopes that being off the medication will help her get her “mojo” back.
Her husband stayed by her side throughout the entire process. The two of them were married in 2010, after Schade was in remission. She leaned in and told me, “This is my third marriage. I have a checkered past.” When I asked if she had any children, her eyes widened. Her inner child, she said, was so strong and loud that having a child herself wasn’t something she would be able to do.
I really do hope that Camilla finds her mojo again, because after her stories about the theatre work she’s done in the past, I can’t help but want to see her do more of it! She’s been in many theatrical productions, one of which was The Vagina Monologues. I told her I was in that show last year as well, and we realized we both had played the same role! Also, she is a playwright and told me about many different plays she has written throughout the years. All of her work sounds extremely creative, challenging, and cathartic. In 2002, before she was even diagnosed, Schade wrote a play called “Am I My Breast Cancer?” She explained how she devised the piece and collaborated with actors as well as dancers to tell a comedic allegory about a woman going through treatment. It amazed me that she wrote this before knowing that cancer was going to affect her life the way it has. Schade nodded at the irony. “I always thought ‘I’m not getting cancer. I couldn’t get cancer.” Camilla went on to tell me there was no real cancer in her family, and she had no known risk factors. “Nowadays it feels like anyone can have it,” she says. “Like it’s something you come down with. ‘I came down with cancer.'”
Camilla described her final surgery in a very theatrical way. When she said goodbye to her husband before they took her to the operating room, she said she really thought she was going to die. A friend had prepared her for what the operating room would look like. Without the warning it would have been that much more difficult and horrifying. As they wheeled her back, she noticed the walls getting plain. The hallway became bigger and wider. Finally when she arrived in in the operating room, it was a cavernous with all of these “alien machines” beaming down at her. All she remembers after that was getting put under anesthesia and then waking up in extreme pain. “Look, I loved that anesthesia. You can knock me out like that whenever you want!”
After the surgery she did follow up radiation therapy in Elmira. Since she went so frequently, she found a social group there in the waiting room, sharing cancer stories while working jigsaw puzzles. However, when her radiation therapy was no longer needed, she felt like she had lost her connection. That’s when she found the Cancer Resource Center. Bob Riter was her first contact. She started to attend meetings at the Cancer Resource Center and found a really strong and supportive community there. The two of us discussed how the center had such a safe and welcoming atmosphere. Camilla told me she tries to go to the weekly Friday brownbag group, as well as participating in CRC events, including the spring retreats, lectures, yoga and walkathon. She described the center as an extraordinary support – creative and open.
As the interview came to a close, Camilla and I talked about meeting again to continue discussing theater. In the future, she hopes to transform her experience into something theatrical and share it through the Cancer Resource Center. It was an absolute pleasure meeting and talking with Camilla, and I expect to see great things from her in the days to come.
Posted by Siona Stone on The Cancer Resource Center of the Finger Lakes website on February 12, 2015
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It’s been 15 years since Camilla Schade left Lancaster for Ithaca, New York.
Love took the actress away. She started seeing a man she “kind of dated” back in high school, they fell in love and were married on their front lawn in 2010.
“We all wore red noses,” Schade remembers with a laugh.
The actress delighted and transfixed Lancaster theater audiences, young and old, for decades, first with her work at the Independent Eye and then at Co-Motion, a theater company she ran with Terri Mastrobuono.
She acted at Fulton Theatre and Franklin & Marshall College. She wrote her own plays and taught theater to children and F&M students for many years.
“It was heartbreaking to leave Lancaster,” she said during a recent phone interview.
Her return here Saturday will be heartbreaking as well. Schade will be performing “Bones,” an extended monologue she has written, at 7 p.m. at the Ware Center.
“I will be reading about my last year with cancer and my travels through that,” Schade says. “A lot about thinking about death.”
Schade had done battle with breast cancer in 2009 and beat it.
This time, things are different.
She has a rare form of ovarian cancer called a multiple malignant mullarian tumor.
“It is aggressive and not nice,” she says. “Ovarian cancer isn’t good, but this is even worse.”
After 15 months of chemo, positive news followed by bad news, exhaustion, anger, support, tears, love, endless tests and hospital visits — fueled all along with humor — nothing more can be done.
It is time to face her mortality, to figure out what to do with all her stuff, say goodbye and make us laugh with her one more time.
“This is just my story. Everybody has a story,” Schade says. “I am struck by the banality of my life, the things I never got to do. I was never a great adventurer. I had that image of myself, but I am not.”
What Schade always has been is a storyteller, a good one and a funny one.
She started writing about her cancer journey with Kira Lallas, a playwright she worked with when she first moved to Ithaca.
As the story turned darker, she decided to keep going.
She does not want it to be a slog or a dirge. She has too much life for that.
“I keep telling Kira this isn’t funny enough. It’s bad when I can’t hook into my sense of humor.”....
“I have this insistent inner child, and when I feel like I am not in contact with that, I know I am pretty depressed,” she says. “But laughing literally hurts.”
Is she worried about such personal material overwhelming her?
“I am really hoping my performance self can take over. I am not trying to work something out on stage. I want the audience to have it, not me.”
....Schade first knew something was wrong in October 2017.
“I got a cold and I couldn’t get rid of it. I took antibiotics, but they didn’t work. Finally, I was having a terrible time breathing in rehearsals for a show. I got an X-ray.”
The X-ray showed that her lung lining was full of liquid.
After having a half gallon of liquid sucked out of her lungs (“It looked like a good IPA,” she says with a chuckle), she felt totally depleted.
A week later, she went to the doctor.
“He takes both my hands and says ‘You have cancer. Cancer cells were floating through all that liquid.’ ”
The official diagnosis was a multiple malignant mullarian tumor.
Worried about the holiday show called “The Snow Queen” for which she was rehearsing, Schade asked if they could delay treatment until the end of December.
“Onstage, I was a tour de force, but offstage I’d back into the walls and hang on,” she recalls. One day, she couldn’t continue.
“In between shows, with me in tears, my husband took me to the ER. There was a blood clot in my lungs, filled with liquid again.”
She started chemo.
“You lose your hair, including your nose hair, so your nose drips all the time,” Schade says. “You look like a plucked chicken.”
The chemo felt like an onslaught.
“You are trading out your blood for something unearthly. You feel like an alien,” she says. “And you just feel sad.”
....Schade did all the things her doctors deemed necessary. Sometimes, there was a flicker of hope. She’d end one therapy and then begin a different one. But ultimately, after more than a year of fighting, they told her there was no more they could do. She was going to die.
“My first thought was ‘Moi? That’s impossible.’ I am 66 years old, I am very active teaching and performing, I have a lot going on.”
Cancer had ruled her life. Now, she thought of death.
“I was fixating on death images. One day, when I was driving down the road, this huge bird was right in front of me flying. And as it spun off, I realized it was a turkey vulture. What more obvious harbinger of death could there be? Then I began seeing them everywhere.”
She wondered what to do with all the stuff she had accumulated in her life.
Friends were supportive. One group of young women she calls The Coven has been there for her from the beginning.
She doesn’t want to hear about how we are all going to die some day. People who say that usually aren’t dealing with the here and now.
And she doesn’t want to be told to think positively.
“Sometimes I’m just pissed off and resentful of the whole thing,” Schade says. “I am mostly scared of things like pain, I’m scared of hurting.”
She is also seeing the beauty in the world in a way she never has before.
“I just love beauty. I am very aware of light and the light changing, of just how gorgeous and beautiful stuff is.
“But it is all mercurial, it all goes by. There is the most beautiful snowfall I’ve ever seen, and it goes away. That is the way it is. You can’t capture it.”
Excerpted from "Camilla Schade's final act: Facing death, theater icon plans one-woman show, 'Bones'" (J. Holahan) posted on LancasterOnline on Apr 28, 2019
She was born and raised on Cape Ann in Beverly, Essex, and Hamilton MA, with brothers Bill and Alan, sister Carolyn, mother Mary and father Addison.
Camilla's theater career began in high school, but her play acting originated in the woods of her childhood home in Essex. After high school came a stint at Montserrat College of Art, a solo hitchhiking trip through Europe, a banking job, and enrollment at the University of Delaware for 3 years.
In 1978, Camilla moved to Lancaster PA to work with the Independent Eye, an experimental theater company run by Conrad Bishop and Elizabeth Fuller. In 1990, she and Terri Mastrobuono started Co-Motion, a theater company that had an amazing nine-year run. Camilla wrote, directed and performed, as well as co-managed the business. She was an adjunct professor at Franklin & Marshall College and privately taught theater to children and adults. She was on stage at the Fulton Opera House many times, perhaps most memorably as the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. And never has there been a better drunken cowboy than Camilla in Parallel Lives. In her play Emily Sticksenstones about loss and hope, she channeled her inner child.
In 2004, Camilla moved to New York State and began a new life in Cayutaville. She soon began working with the Hangar Theatre's Project 4 in nearby Ithaca which puts artists in 4th grade classrooms to create plays with students and teachers. Camilla's enthusiasm was infectious and she delighted in introducing stagecraft to her young charges, especially the shy ones. Other theater teaching work included Ithaca Youth Bureau, Hangar Theatre summer camps, after school workshops, Big Brothers Big Sisters, and 171 Cedar Arts in Corning NY. Her favorite teaching work was writing and performing plays with adults with disabilities for Pathways, Inc. in Corning.
In 2010, Camilla, with Kira Lallas, wrote, produced and performed her one-woman group therapy comedy piece about depression, Performing Therapy. In it, she touched on the loss of her theater company, her upheaval moving to a new area, her father's death, and caring for her mother with Alzheimer's disease—a stunning show that highlighted all of Camilla's theatrical talents. No one could do more with a balloon.
Camilla worked with the Ithaca theater community onstage at the Hangar Theatre, Kitchen Theatre, Cinemapolis, Cherry Arts and Homecoming Players. She performed in many short plays, staged readings, radio voiceovers, and public events. She did narration for Music's Recreation and the Grass Roots Orchestra. She charmed audiences with her character Mabel McClafferty at the Cancer Resource Center's annual fundraiser, One Funny Ithaca. She even played Einstein at Cornell University.
Camilla's artistry and creativity did not end at the stage door. She was a prolific craftsperson, making quilts, wall hangings, drawings and, of course, multicolored scrubbies. She loved tending her gardens and upgrading her beloved "shackteau" in Cayutaville.
Camilla's warmth and sincere interest in others' lives made human interactions possible that were not ordinary. She would routinely light up a room with her smile and energy. We were all better people if Camilla was nearby.
Camilla leaves behind her extremely lucky husband, Bruce Fearon, her close and most loyal younger sister Carolyn Cadigan (husband Rufus) in Rockford, Illinois, her brother Bill in Seattle WA, her brother Alan in Lancaster PA, her stepson Gabe in Colorado, her stepson Cody in Ithaca, and several beloved cousins, nieces and nephews. Camilla's large community of close friends in Lancaster, Ithaca, and beyond will keep her memory alive with laughter and shared stories.
The family would like to thank Dr. TImothy Bael, his staff, the wonderful nurses/angels at Cayuga Medical Center Oncology and CareFirst Hospice, as well as the volunteers at the Cancer Resource Center.
Camilla's parting gift is her monologue about the last year of her life, entitled Bones.
A celebration of Camilla's life will be held 7 pm Monday, August 26th at the Hangar Theatre. Please honor her life with a belly laugh and a creative thought.
Information from Perkins Funeral Home
An obituary was published in The Ithaca Journal on June 5, 2019
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Camilla Schade, a longtime fixture in the Lancaster theater scene until she moved to New York state 15 years ago, died May 23 of cancer at the age of 66. Her last performance — a one-woman show, “Bones,” about her struggle with the disease — was May 4 at The Ware Center in Lancaster.
It says a lot about Lancaster that, in the last weeks of her life, Camilla Schade chose to make her final onstage appearance here, in front of beloved friends and others from the local arts community.
But it says even more about Schade, who came to Lancaster in 1978 and forged an impressive legacy in the theater scene for more than a quarter century, until she left in 2004 to join her future husband in the Ithaca, New York, area.
Lancaster made a huge impression on her — and she never forgot. She told LNP’s Jane Holahan that, despite being away for 15 years, she considered this area her theatrical home.
Barry Kornhauser, who worked with Schade at the Fulton Theatre, said this of her May 4 monologue, which was filled with as much laughter as tears: “It was a great gift to this community and to Camilla, too. She knew this was her last performance, and she wanted to do it here.”
Upon learning of her death, Kornhauser said that Schade “made a real impact on theatrical life in Lancaster. She was an equally brilliant artist and wonderful human being.”
In a Facebook post, local theater director Laura Howell wrote: “She will be missed by so many people who knew and loved her — too numerous to count. We were all made a little bit better for knowing her and loving her.”
In the late 1970s, Schade arrived in Lancaster to work with the Independent Eye, a small experimental theater company run by Conrad and Linda Bishop.
“Those were truly my apprentice years,’’ Schade said in a newspaper interview. “I got to discover what I could do.”
After the Bishops moved to Philadelphia, Schade and actress Terri Mastrobuono founded Co-Motion, a company based on movement theater, which operated from 1990 to 1998. Schade was a theatrical jack-of-all-trades — directing, writing plays and performing.
She also worked as an actor and an instructor at the Fulton, and an adjunct professor at Franklin & Marshall College, performing in the Green Room Theatre on campus.
Schade had already endured breast cancer before she was diagnosed with a rare form of ovarian cancer — a multiple malignant Mullerian tumor.
“It is aggressive and not nice,” she told Holahan. “Ovarian cancer isn’t good, but this is even worse.”
After a year and a half of chemotherapy — positive news alternating with bad news, exhaustion, anger, support, tears, love, tests and hospital visits, but all accompanied with humor — Schade was told that nothing more could be done.
In an interview with Holahan prior to her “Bones” performance in Lancaster, she said this of the autobiographical monologue: “This is just my story. Everybody has a story.”
With characteristic honesty, Schade also told LNP as she neared the end, “I am mostly scared of things like pain. I’m scared of hurting.”
She added: “I just love beauty. I am very aware of light and the light changing, of just how gorgeous and beautiful stuff is.
“But it is all mercurial, it all goes by. There is the most beautiful snowfall I’ve ever seen, and it goes away. That is the way it is. You can’t capture it.”
We agree with LNP’s Holahan, who wrote:
“She didn’t say this, but I believe Schade was leaving ‘Bones’ behind as a gift to her friends, to her family, to anyone who has to acknowledge that loss and tragedy are a part of our lives whether we are 8 and looking for our lost dog, or 66 and facing death.
“Thank you, Camilla. Thank you for having an open heart and a way of expressing that heart so beautifully.”
As the curtain goes down on Schade’s well-lived life, in which she positively impacted so many others, we will always remember how much of that life she shared — including her final act — with us.
~From an editorial published in LancasterOnline on June1, 2019
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—From EF—
Traveling can be harsh. Not so much when getting into our Prius to drive 600 miles a day to cross the country, it’s a comfy car and we have each other, but it does take stamina. On the other hand, grabbing a last-minute ticket and flying from San Francisco to Scranton, PA with a change in Charlotte (Chicago on the way back) was a symphony of Harsh. It was OK because every minute of the trip was warmed and colored by its purpose. I went to visit Camilla Schade.
Camilla is quicksilver and color, a luminous presence on stage, someone who can take a character onto a roller-coaster and bring every audience member along for the ride. Beautiful and funny, the embodiment of warmth. I flew to Scranton, drove to upstate New York, parked by their little woodland house, and went in to sit on a couch with my friend for five hours. The last embrace was the hardest, because it will have been the last one.
We met in 1975, when she was to be our newborn Johanna’s babysitter as we created a show called Knock Knock with a student cast at the University of Delaware. She wound up in the cast and we found another sitter. When we moved our theatre’s base to Lancaster PA, we asked Camilla to join us, and she did. We worked together for years, everything from Macbeth to cabaret comedy, and the stories are endless.
Five rich and beautiful hours. Some of it in silent presence, some of it giggling like schoolgirls, some of it soggy with kleenex, some of it telling funny old war stories to sister Carolyn and husband Bruce.
Warmth, color and closeness in a place of quiet beauty. The rituals of greeting and farewell, the essentials of human closeness, softness, vulnerability.
And then the grotesque circus of O’Hare airport, miles of noisy halls and beeping trollies and four-dollar water bottles. Rattle and clang under fluorescent lights, hurry up and wait, staring at the smart-phone, trying to ignore Fox on the screens. What wildly different stage sets we humans create to enclose the multiple stories of our lives. For five hours I was in a place of beauty.
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Posted by Elizabeth Fuller on DamnedFool.com, May 14, 2019. The blog is a a companion to the website of The Independent Eye, Conrad Bishop and Elizabeth Fuller's theatre ensemble now (2019) in its 43rd season.
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After only a few short minutes of talking with Camilla Schade, I had completely forgotten we were in Ithaca Bakery. I had forgotten my phone was recording our interview, and most remarkably, I had forgotten we had only met just moments before. As the time ticked on, the interview transformed into two girls simply catching up, laughing and crying over stories that were longing to be told.
Schade was first diagnosed with cancer in 2009. “I changed into a dress the day I found out,” she said. “I wanted to feel feminine. I wanted to feel pretty.” Her response did not surprise me, because she had already told me earlier about the attractive blouse she was wearing on the day of her biopsy. It was very clear to me that Camilla was not going to allow the cancer to take her beauty and her girl-ness away. “But I had accepted that I was going to lose my hair. For some reason, that didn’t bother me.” Luckily, her treatment did not cause her hair to fall out. Camilla has very long, thick hair; however she felt that she should possibly tie her hair back at support meetings. Having all of that long, flowing hair in front of people who needed wigs might have been very uncomfortable or unfair to them. “Hair is a big deal,” she said. “Hair is a really, really huge deal. I know. I love my hair.”
The biopsy was the worst part of the whole experience, she says, because she had to be awake for the entire thing. She talked about how frightening it was since there were specific moments when she wasn’t allowed to breathe. Sometimes her mind would wander and then she’d come back to consciousness in a panic over whether or not she’d taken a breath when she wasn’t supposed to. Camilla then added, “They must have thought I was really strong because they left out all the tools and bloody tubes for me to see as I left.”
When explaining her cancer, Camilla told me that it was estrogen-fed, and her doctor called it a garden variety. “Garden variety!” she scoffs. “I’m thinking ‘It’s not a garden variety cancer, it’s MY cancer!’ It got personal. “I had just gone through menopause and cancer was the cherry on top of the menopause sundae! And you can write that down!” she laughed. Also, she explained that she developed a protective gesture where she would hold her arm close to her breast. After the surgery, she felt the constant need to protect that area, and it took some time for her to let that gesture go.
However, despite all the difficulties, she did make one comment that some women might be a little surprised to hear. “I rather enjoyed hot flashes.” She puffed up and showed me her muscles. “I felt powerful. Energized.” After we shared another laugh, which seemed to be a constant theme during this interview, she told me that she was on an estrogen medication that starting tomorrow she would stop taking. She talked with her doctor, and they agreed on a healthy way to proceed. She hopes that being off the medication will help her get her “mojo” back.
Her husband stayed by her side throughout the entire process. The two of them were married in 2010, after Schade was in remission. She leaned in and told me, “This is my third marriage. I have a checkered past.” When I asked if she had any children, her eyes widened. Her inner child, she said, was so strong and loud that having a child herself wasn’t something she would be able to do.
I really do hope that Camilla finds her mojo again, because after her stories about the theatre work she’s done in the past, I can’t help but want to see her do more of it! She’s been in many theatrical productions, one of which was The Vagina Monologues. I told her I was in that show last year as well, and we realized we both had played the same role! Also, she is a playwright and told me about many different plays she has written throughout the years. All of her work sounds extremely creative, challenging, and cathartic. In 2002, before she was even diagnosed, Schade wrote a play called “Am I My Breast Cancer?” She explained how she devised the piece and collaborated with actors as well as dancers to tell a comedic allegory about a woman going through treatment. It amazed me that she wrote this before knowing that cancer was going to affect her life the way it has. Schade nodded at the irony. “I always thought ‘I’m not getting cancer. I couldn’t get cancer.” Camilla went on to tell me there was no real cancer in her family, and she had no known risk factors. “Nowadays it feels like anyone can have it,” she says. “Like it’s something you come down with. ‘I came down with cancer.'”
Camilla described her final surgery in a very theatrical way. When she said goodbye to her husband before they took her to the operating room, she said she really thought she was going to die. A friend had prepared her for what the operating room would look like. Without the warning it would have been that much more difficult and horrifying. As they wheeled her back, she noticed the walls getting plain. The hallway became bigger and wider. Finally when she arrived in in the operating room, it was a cavernous with all of these “alien machines” beaming down at her. All she remembers after that was getting put under anesthesia and then waking up in extreme pain. “Look, I loved that anesthesia. You can knock me out like that whenever you want!”
After the surgery she did follow up radiation therapy in Elmira. Since she went so frequently, she found a social group there in the waiting room, sharing cancer stories while working jigsaw puzzles. However, when her radiation therapy was no longer needed, she felt like she had lost her connection. That’s when she found the Cancer Resource Center. Bob Riter was her first contact. She started to attend meetings at the Cancer Resource Center and found a really strong and supportive community there. The two of us discussed how the center had such a safe and welcoming atmosphere. Camilla told me she tries to go to the weekly Friday brownbag group, as well as participating in CRC events, including the spring retreats, lectures, yoga and walkathon. She described the center as an extraordinary support – creative and open.
As the interview came to a close, Camilla and I talked about meeting again to continue discussing theater. In the future, she hopes to transform her experience into something theatrical and share it through the Cancer Resource Center. It was an absolute pleasure meeting and talking with Camilla, and I expect to see great things from her in the days to come.
Posted by Siona Stone on The Cancer Resource Center of the Finger Lakes website on February 12, 2015
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It’s been 15 years since Camilla Schade left Lancaster for Ithaca, New York.
Love took the actress away. She started seeing a man she “kind of dated” back in high school, they fell in love and were married on their front lawn in 2010.
“We all wore red noses,” Schade remembers with a laugh.
The actress delighted and transfixed Lancaster theater audiences, young and old, for decades, first with her work at the Independent Eye and then at Co-Motion, a theater company she ran with Terri Mastrobuono.
She acted at Fulton Theatre and Franklin & Marshall College. She wrote her own plays and taught theater to children and F&M students for many years.
“It was heartbreaking to leave Lancaster,” she said during a recent phone interview.
Her return here Saturday will be heartbreaking as well. Schade will be performing “Bones,” an extended monologue she has written, at 7 p.m. at the Ware Center.
“I will be reading about my last year with cancer and my travels through that,” Schade says. “A lot about thinking about death.”
Schade had done battle with breast cancer in 2009 and beat it.
This time, things are different.
She has a rare form of ovarian cancer called a multiple malignant mullarian tumor.
“It is aggressive and not nice,” she says. “Ovarian cancer isn’t good, but this is even worse.”
After 15 months of chemo, positive news followed by bad news, exhaustion, anger, support, tears, love, endless tests and hospital visits — fueled all along with humor — nothing more can be done.
It is time to face her mortality, to figure out what to do with all her stuff, say goodbye and make us laugh with her one more time.
“This is just my story. Everybody has a story,” Schade says. “I am struck by the banality of my life, the things I never got to do. I was never a great adventurer. I had that image of myself, but I am not.”
What Schade always has been is a storyteller, a good one and a funny one.
She started writing about her cancer journey with Kira Lallas, a playwright she worked with when she first moved to Ithaca.
As the story turned darker, she decided to keep going.
She does not want it to be a slog or a dirge. She has too much life for that.
“I keep telling Kira this isn’t funny enough. It’s bad when I can’t hook into my sense of humor.”....
“I have this insistent inner child, and when I feel like I am not in contact with that, I know I am pretty depressed,” she says. “But laughing literally hurts.”
Is she worried about such personal material overwhelming her?
“I am really hoping my performance self can take over. I am not trying to work something out on stage. I want the audience to have it, not me.”
....Schade first knew something was wrong in October 2017.
“I got a cold and I couldn’t get rid of it. I took antibiotics, but they didn’t work. Finally, I was having a terrible time breathing in rehearsals for a show. I got an X-ray.”
The X-ray showed that her lung lining was full of liquid.
After having a half gallon of liquid sucked out of her lungs (“It looked like a good IPA,” she says with a chuckle), she felt totally depleted.
A week later, she went to the doctor.
“He takes both my hands and says ‘You have cancer. Cancer cells were floating through all that liquid.’ ”
The official diagnosis was a multiple malignant mullarian tumor.
Worried about the holiday show called “The Snow Queen” for which she was rehearsing, Schade asked if they could delay treatment until the end of December.
“Onstage, I was a tour de force, but offstage I’d back into the walls and hang on,” she recalls. One day, she couldn’t continue.
“In between shows, with me in tears, my husband took me to the ER. There was a blood clot in my lungs, filled with liquid again.”
She started chemo.
“You lose your hair, including your nose hair, so your nose drips all the time,” Schade says. “You look like a plucked chicken.”
The chemo felt like an onslaught.
“You are trading out your blood for something unearthly. You feel like an alien,” she says. “And you just feel sad.”
....Schade did all the things her doctors deemed necessary. Sometimes, there was a flicker of hope. She’d end one therapy and then begin a different one. But ultimately, after more than a year of fighting, they told her there was no more they could do. She was going to die.
“My first thought was ‘Moi? That’s impossible.’ I am 66 years old, I am very active teaching and performing, I have a lot going on.”
Cancer had ruled her life. Now, she thought of death.
“I was fixating on death images. One day, when I was driving down the road, this huge bird was right in front of me flying. And as it spun off, I realized it was a turkey vulture. What more obvious harbinger of death could there be? Then I began seeing them everywhere.”
She wondered what to do with all the stuff she had accumulated in her life.
Friends were supportive. One group of young women she calls The Coven has been there for her from the beginning.
She doesn’t want to hear about how we are all going to die some day. People who say that usually aren’t dealing with the here and now.
And she doesn’t want to be told to think positively.
“Sometimes I’m just pissed off and resentful of the whole thing,” Schade says. “I am mostly scared of things like pain, I’m scared of hurting.”
She is also seeing the beauty in the world in a way she never has before.
“I just love beauty. I am very aware of light and the light changing, of just how gorgeous and beautiful stuff is.
“But it is all mercurial, it all goes by. There is the most beautiful snowfall I’ve ever seen, and it goes away. That is the way it is. You can’t capture it.”
Excerpted from "Camilla Schade's final act: Facing death, theater icon plans one-woman show, 'Bones'" (J. Holahan) posted on LancasterOnline on Apr 28, 2019
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