This summer has seen many endings. Local legends Tom Kane, Grace Johansen and Charles Knapp have slipped the mortal coil, along with our dear canine companion, Aengus. Another dear friend is in hospice care, yet she is the most fully alive person I know. I treasure every day she triumphs over an untimely end. The Weather Project, NACL’s climate change theatrical and community extravaganza presented its last performance on August 26 at SUNY Sullivan. I was with it from the beginning in 2012, a long and fruitful ride.

Throughout this unsteady summer, the Bard has been my steady companion. Fellow actor John Higgins and I have been rehearsing a play written by Ben Power, “A Tender Thing,” that uses the verse of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” along with texts from other of his plays and sonnets, to construct a vision of another Romeo and Juliet, in another time, wiser and older yet still deeply in love with each other and life. It is a work that so closely mirrors the experience of aging and mortality that it is easy to conflate the play’s world with our own. Still, John and I and our director, Mimi McGurl, are having a ball with it.

As a young actor, I would never have been cast as Juliet, so this is a great opportunity to say those immortal lines and feel the passion of these quintessential star-crossed lovers. I was not schooled much in Shakespearean acting. I had one semester in college and got my only C. But after a fairly long life, his language has become more natural to me. His sonnets have always been in my heart and mind, even when a callow youth. And Mimi is an experienced director, who extracts the meaning and action of each moment of this elegant verse and keeps her actors on solid ground even when they want to soar with the poetry aloft.

John Higgins is a fine actor, returning only recently to the profession after 25 years as a director/producer of television. Like me, he might not have been a director’s first choice for Romeo in his youth. We share an Irish mug, his gap-toothed (charmingly so), mine crooked (less charming.) But when we are with the Bard, we are as beautiful to one another as the stars in heaven.

In life, we are good friends with long happy marriages of our own. My Juliet is dying; I am not. His Romeo is facing the imminent loss of his dearest love; John is not. “Is love a tender thing?” asks Shakespeare. “It is too rough, too rude, too boisterous, and it pricks like thorn.” There’s a certain text, I think we can agree. We have each been drawn to this drama of love and loss by our own experiences and with the ever-present aspect of aging in our lives. One friend has chosen a precipitous end to the certain decay of illness. Another rails against it by living fully in the moment. Both are honorable choices. Both are hard decisions to make and keep.

Says Romeo faced with the loss of his love: “Oh, how shall summer’s honey breath hold out /Against the wrackful siege of batt’ring days./When rocks impregnable are not so stout/ Nor gates of steel so strong but time decays?”/Not brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea/But sad mortality o’ersways their power.” “How then will beauty hold a plea/whose action is no stronger than a flower?” replies Juliet. A younger Romeo and Juliet, with beauty and youth on their side, could not have played this text with the fullness of our combined experience.