Joe and Ann met in 1964Joe was a young soldier on leave, and Ann was a nurse at the local hospital, working tirelessly to tend to the men who came home battered and bruised. One afternoon, they happened to sit next to each other on a rickety bench in a small park by the hospital. Joe, looking down at his boots, noticed a young woman with kind eyes and a quiet smile reading a book beside him. They struck up a conversation about the book, and Joe felt like he’d been swept away to another world, far from the war and all its chaos.
The very next day, Joe had to leave for deployment again, but before he did, they arranged to meet on that same bench, no matter where life took them. Miraculously, they both survived the war, and when Joe returned, he found Ann waiting for him on that bench, a familiar sparkle in her eyes. They shared a lifetime together, raising a family, building a home, and creating a love that would endure the tests of time.
When they retired at age 55, they made it their tradition to return to that very park every single day, to sit together on their bench. Rain or shine, they’d be there, side by side, sharing stories, laughing, or just holding hands in comfortable silence. As the years went on, people in the town started calling it “Joe and Ann’s Bench.” Young couples would stop and smile at the sight of them, seeing the kind of love they hoped to grow into one day.
Their lives were filled with seasons of change—new grandkids, old friends passing, aches and pains that came with age—but that bench stayed the same. To them, it was more than a spot in the park; it was a witness to their love story, to all the memories they’d shared there.
Now, at 100 years old, they still meet at that bench every day. Joe helps Ann with her coat, and Ann straightens Joe’s hat before they sit. They often laugh about how old they’ve gotten, and every once in a while, Ann will lean her head on Joe’s shoulder like she did in the early days. Sometimes they’re silent for long stretches, but in that silence, they feel the weight of the love they’ve built together, rich with a thousand unspoken words.
When people ask them the secret to staying in love for so long, Joe always winks and says, “Just find someone you want to sit with, forever.” Ann always smiles at him when he says this, knowing he still means it with his whole heart.
Actress Anne Heche Dead at 53 After High-Speed Car Crash
Anne Heche has died of a brain injury and severe burns after speeding and crashing her car into a home in the residential Mar Vista neighborhood last Friday, Aug 5. The building erupted in flames and Heche was dragged out of the vehicle and rushed to the Grossman Burn Center at West Hills Hospital in Los Angeles.
The 53-year-old, Emmy Award-winning actress is best known for her roles in 1990s films like Volcano, the Gus Van Sant remake of Psycho, Donnie Brasco and Six Days, Seven Nights.
Holly Baird, a spokesperson for Heche’s family, sent NPR a statement Friday afternoon saying: “While Anne is legally dead according to California law, her heart is still beating, and she has not been taken off life support.”
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Baird added an organ procurement company is working to see if the actress is a match for organ donation, and that determination could be made as early as Saturday or as late as next Tuesday.
Heche launched her career playing a pair of good and evil twins on the long-running daytime soap opera Another World, for which she earned a Daytime Emmy Award in 1991.
In the 2000s, Heche focused on making independent movies and TV series. She acted with Nicole Kidman and Cameron Bright in the drama Birth; with Jessica Lange and Christina Ricci in the film adaptation of Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel’s bestselling book about depression; and in the comedy Cedar Rapids alongside John C. Reilly and Ed Helms. She also starred in the ABC drama series Men in Trees.
Heche made guest appearances on TV shows like Nip/Tuck and Ally McBeal and starred in a couple of Broadway productions, garnering a Tony Award nomination for her performance in the remount of the 1932 comedy Twentieth Century.
In 2020, Heche launched a weekly lifestyle podcast, Better Together, with friend and co-host Heather Duffy and appeared on Dancing with the Stars.
Heche became a lesbian icon as a result of her highly-visible relationship with comedian and TV host Ellen DeGeneres in the late 1990s.
Heche and DeGeneres were arguably the most famous openly gay couple in Hollywood at a time when being out was far less acceptable than it is today. Heche later claimed the romance took a toll on her career. “I was in a relationship with Ellen DeGeneres for three-and-a-half years and the stigma attached to that relationship was so bad that I was fired from my multimillion-dollar picture deal and I did not work in a studio picture for 10 years,” Heche said in an episode of Dancing with the Stars.
But the relationship paved the way for broader acceptance of single-sex partnerships.
“With so few role models and representations of lesbians in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Anne Heche’s relationship with Ellen DeGeneres contributed to her celebrity in a significant way and their relationship ultimately validated lesbian love for both straight and queer people,” said the Los Angeles-based New York Times columnist Trish Bendix.
Bendix said that while Heche was later in relationships with men — she married Coleman Laffoon in the early 2000s and they had a son together, and was more recently in a relationship with Canadian actor James Tupper with whom she also had a son — “her influence on lesbian and bisexual visibility can’t and shouldn’t be erased.”
In 2000, Fresh Air host Terry Gross interviewed Heche in advance of her directorial debut on the final episode of If These Walls Could Talk 2, a series of three HBO television films exploring the lives of lesbian couples starring DeGeneres and Sharon Stone. In the interview, Heche said she wished she had been more sensitive about other people’s coming out experiences when she and DeGeneres went public with their relationship.
“What I wish I would have known is more of the journey and the struggle of individuals in the gay community or couples in the gay community,” Heche said. “Because I would have couched my enthusiasm with an understanding that this isn’t everybody’s story.”
Heche was born in Aurora, Ohio in 1969, the youngest of five siblings. She was raised in a Christian fundamentalist household.
She had a challenging childhood. The family moved around a lot. She said she believed her father, Donald, was a closeted gay man; he died in 1983 of HIV.
“He just couldn’t seem to settle down into a normal job, which, of course, we found out later, and as I understand it now, was because he had another life,” Heche told Gross on Fresh Air. “He wanted to be with men.”
A few months after her father died, Heche’s brother Nathan was killed in a car crash at the age of 18.
In her 2001 Memoir Call Me Crazy, and in subsequent interviews, Heche said her father abused her sexually as a child, triggering mental health issues which the actress said she carried with her for decades as an adult.
In an interview with the actress for Larry King Live, host Larry King called Heche’s book, “one of the most honest, outspoken, extraordinary autobiographies ever written by anyone in show business.”
“I am left with a deep, wordless sadness,” wrote Heche’s son with Lafoon, Homer, in a statement shared with NPR via Baird. “Hopefully my mom is free from pain and beginning to explore what I like to imagine as her eternal freedom.”
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