There is something oddly prophetic in this photo, and it captures so much of who she was.

A jarring message found me in Asia the other day. Mallory Diedrich, still months shy of her 48th birthday, had died of a heart attack. Shock and dismay soon gave way to deep sadness.  All the promises we made to make up for lost time now just spittle in the wind.

I first met Mallory Diedrich when she was fresh out of college, student teaching at North Haven High, where I taught English and Drama. She was young, excited, and delighted to jump in and help out with our production work. I was grateful, but I hardly got to know her. We were both busy – me with my assorted lives and she with hers. But I was able to discern three essential insights.

1. Mallory loved theater and horses in interchangeable order. (This was pre-Matt, who added a third love that took first place always. But that came later.)
2. Mallory was a seasoned stage manager, the kind high school theater directors rarely get to work with.
3. Mallory was enormously generous with her time and her resources.

Unaware how much I would come to depend on them, I stored the tidbits in a corner of my brain.

Some years later, at a time when my life was falling apart in all kinds of ways, Mallory called me to tell me there was a job for a director at a youth theater in the Valley. She had signed on to stage manage and had recommended the board hire me as director. I needed that job terribly. Thanks to Mallory, I got it.

At the time, for a number of reasons, I was a mess. As a result, the theater production I was hired to direct was also a mess. I should have self-destructed and would have. Were it not for Mallory.

As SM, Mall covered for me in forty different ways. Maybe a hundred. She kept me from being fired. She smoothed over some of the worst blunders. There were too many ways she fixed things to enumerate. Suffice it to say that , thanks to Mallory, the kids had a positive experience. Then, to round off her sainthood, Mallory saved my life.

Bagelfish and I found a home here, thanks to Mallory and Matthew.

In the midst of other chaos erupting around me, my thirty-three-year marriage fell apart. I had not expected that to happen. I became a certifiable train wreck. With no money, no place to go, and I had to leave. Mallory and her husband Matt had just bought a compound on Townsend Avenue, and it needed some work before they could rent out the units. Mallory offered me a home, told me not to worry about paying her until I could figure it all out. Not only did I move in, but my Bagel Fish Productions partner and his wife got a good deal on another unit, and Mallory and Matt adopted our company.

The rest of The Compound

For two years, then, I lived on Townsend Avenue. Bagel Fish hosted Nosferatu screenings and offered screenwriting and acting classes, made a couple of short films in the house where I was living. We even commandeered Mall and Matt’s dog Natalie and their house for a mockumentary we made about a woman who ran a pet yoga center. Mallory and Matt believed so entirely in our work that they kept our rent ridiculously low and accepted a trade of work in lieu of any real money. When I left the compound, I felt like I was leaving a support system, one I knew I would never find anywhere else. That was fourteen years ago.

Mallory and I were only minimally in touch in recent years. Of course, I saw her at the sad funeral for Mallory and Matthew’s firstborn Adam. But I have never met Jace. We chatted on Facebook, exchanged notes every once in a while. She and I both raved about the joy of sharing the Stepping Stones Children’s Museum with little ‘n’s and promised we’d meet there – she with Jace and I with my granddaughters – but all three of the children grew out of the place, and still we had not met. Just a few weeks ago, I received another poke on FB and a note from her. “Are we ever going to do this?” She asked.

Apparently not. For which I am deeply sorry.

I am also sorry I didn’t know Mallory better. She was a deeply good woman, who was always willing to share. Her love was abundant, and we all knew that by the gifts she so easily dispensed to her family and friends.

Jace has lost the best mom he could have had, and Matthew has lost his great true love. Both of them will go on, but neither will ever be whole in the same way again. My great hope is that Matthew talks about Mallory a lot. That all their friends and family members share with Jace what a treasure she was. That he grows up knowing that she was deeply treasured, greatly loved by people he will likely never know. He should be proud that Mallory Diedrich chose to be his mother.

Let her live in all our hearts and stories.