John Spencer

My husband and I are huge The West Wing fans (“The West Wing”). In the last 20 years we somehow learned that the late actor John Spencer, who played White House Chief of Staff Leo McGarry and sadly passed away during the last season of the TV series, is buried 100 miles from where we live. In the area a few weeks ago we set out to pay our respects to him. Mister Rain has traversed many a cemetery in the past few years during our ancestral searches, therefore, it didn’t take him long to locate John’s site while I waited by the car. When he called my name, I grabbed my trekking poles from the back seat, then made my way to where he stood. As I got close, I could see something moving on the ground. It was a small American flag. Lying beside it was a photo of John someone had left behind. All the markers at this cemetery lay flat; in most cases the grass covers them. My husband brushed back the winter brown coverage revealing:

JOHN SPENCER
ACTOR
1946 – 2005

It made me sad. Here was this beloved actor not in Forest Lawn in Los Angeles among his peers but Laurel Grove Cemetery in Totowa, New Jersey, his hometown, with the simplest of plaques above where he lays. I don’t mean to get morbid, but all I could think was that the body of this man that gave me so much pleasure, was such an incredible talent, had won awards, battled alcoholism and was in recovery, whose three-minute walk and talk was the very first of its kind in season 1, episode 1 was placed here two decades ago at the age of 58. I wondered if the cast of The West Wing had stood here. I had read about their grief at losing John. There is a church in the middle of the cemetery. Had there been a service here for him in addition to the one in California during which his co-star Kristin Chenoweth sang “For Good” from Wicked? (She had caught him smoking a cigarette two weeks before he died and had scolded him. He told her that every day without a cigarette is hell, that he just wanted this one. He then told her if he died, he had one request, that she sing “For Good” at his funeral. She told him that wouldn’t be for awhile.)

Perhaps in some weird way I was starstruck. I wasn’t getting an autograph or taking a selfie with him, but it did feel, in some strange way, as though I was meeting John Spencer. Of course at the end of the day, the end of a life, John Spencer was a man. He loved, he lost, he laughed, he cried, he struggled, he failed and he succeeded. His profession is no more important than any other. Some consider what he did for a living frivolous. But it certainly gave him the exposure that few careers do.

I traced the word “ACTOR” with my finger, as that was how I knew him. Then I laid my palm across the letter J-O-H-N. “You bought us such joy, John. Thank you. I hope that you know that you are not forgotten. We’re just a couple of Wingnuts from Pennsylvania but we have wanted to come see you for years. I just rewatched all the seasons of The West Wing last year and you are spectacular.”

With my love of US history, I have visited the graves of great people such as George Washington, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Ben Franklin, every single person at Arlington National Cemetery. Their final resting places are impressive and what you would expect. John Spencer was never the President of the United States, not even in the fictional Oval Office I was privy to for seven years on Wednesday evenings. But we spent a lot of years together and he never disappointed me. He may not have a large ornate headstone but his impact on many of us is monumental.