The performance of a lifetime: Rose Cooper’s advice for the stage and marriage
Just stay.
If you’ve ever performed onstage and forgotten your lines, one of the first things you’re taught is to just stay. Be present. The audience isn’t looking for perfection. They’re looking for you to be there.
I met Rose Cooper when I was in college, at MSU Slam Team meetings.
I was young and going through a divorce; a bit erratic, hurt and loud in all the places where I should have been quiet, and quiet in all the places where I should have been loud.
When I asked Rose how she had stayed in her marriage, she gave me advice: you just stay. Stay present, even if you can’t remember the next line.
You may know Rose from singing on a motorcycle around town or from her work onstage. You may have seen her in Fatherland or read previous articles about her in City Pulse. But behind the curtains, you may not know that Rose is also caring for her husband, Michael, whose dementia has been progressing for years.
As a performance poet myself, I had to ask her how she manages all of it. Being a caregiver while remaining present in her artistic life. Rose told me she leans on her village.
Rose told me what she meant at an archery event. She loves bringing Michael to her events, and Michael loves going with her. He is still part of the life she has built: the theater, the poetry, the archery, the people she has gathered around her.
One time, suddenly, Michael wasn’t feeling well. And people came.
People they had never met before opened their loving arms to the couple. They stayed with Michael, made sure he had food. They gave Rose enough space to compete in her first archery competition.
Sometimes you don’t know who will step into the scene until the moment arrives.
In Rose’s performance of life, she stays with Michael.
Rose and Michael met when she was 18, on her first day of college.
Michael was the kind of person who would stop and teach a stranger how to drive a manual car if he saw them struggling. The kind of person you keep in your life.
So Rose did, and they’ve been married for forty-five years.
They both call it love at first sight.
This is where it gets gross and mushy, so I completely understand if you stop reading here.
On their first day of college, Michael accidentally knocked over the cute 18-year-old he’d noticed coming out of her Lincoln Continental at Oakland University earlier that day.
Rose calls the accident fate. A cosmic collision that introduced her to her soulmate.
Michael became her North Star, bringing out the best in her. That’s what a good love does: it gives you the freedom to become more fully yourself. Rose tells me that nothing feels completely real until she can tell Michael about it. They’ve been through hard times. And when I asked her about their marriage, one thing she told me stayed with me:
He has never been mean to her. Not once.
Forty-five years together, and that is what she remembers. Not that everything was perfect. Not that they never struggled. But that, through it all, he was kind.
I think about that now when I think about what Rose told me all those years ago.
What happens when the person you love is still there, but parts of the person you’ve known begin to disappear? When conversations repeat? When memories fade? When things once needing no explanation now require extraordinary patience?
The applause ends.
The audience leaves.
The makeup comes off.
And there is no performance left to give.
That’s when you find out what the relationship actually is.
Sometimes staying means laughing together. Sometimes it means sitting in silence. Sometimes it means leaning on your village so you can keep showing up. And sometimes it means bringing the person you love with you, not because they can always participate the way they once did, but because they are still part of your life.
Michael still goes to Rose’s events. Rose still wants him there. And when he needs help, people step into the scene. That’s love, too. Not a perfect performance. Not a grand gesture. Just people staying.
