Mathew – Mr. Boots

It had been a terrible day. And most of us were in shock. Yet, the show much go on, People had paid tickets to see us perform Sleeping Beauty and it was not an option to not dance. But most were in shock. Most were numb from what had happened. And most were doing their best to cope so we could get through this performance in Aspen Colorado.

 

Let’s talk about the Summers in Aspen, Colorado with Ballet West

All of the Ballet West dancers were on our way to our Summer Performances that yearly happened in Aspen, Colorado.

It was beautiful to be in Aspen and many of the dancers drove in carpools from Salt Lake City, UT to Aspen … the same day.
It took usually about 8 hours and we needed a car there because we stayed in Snowmass and Aspen was about 8 miles away from where we performed.

I loved this area.
It had been a yearly vacation place for my family throughout my childhood.

Every year my father had a two-week vacation and he drove us all night to get from Dallas to Colorado so we could camp and wake up in the glorious Rocky Mountains.

Colorado is one of those places that I have mostly happy memories of camping, backpacking, hiking, fishing, and doing all the things that kids are supposed to do growing up.

 

I had been in Ballet West a few years and so I knew the summer routine. I had decided to drive my own car to Colorado and was excited to be back in familiar mountains and the haunts of my childhood.

Mathew was one of the dancers that was a character in lots of ways. He had a quick smile and a devilish attitude. He was strong and determined, kind and funny.
As a dancer, we accept the quirks and the patterns that we know manifest great artists.

All artists are built differently. They are a unique and usual bunch that refuse to conform and often operate outside the established social parameters.

Ballet dancers are no different even though ballet is more like being in the military.

I remember how young all of us were. I was probably only 25 at the time and we learned to accept the oddities of each personality in ballet companies.

Dancers can be overly self-disciplined and then … radically not. Many swing from extremes emotionally and I marvel sometimes at their ability to pull things together for performances.

Mathew was a joker, a talented dancer, he had a great sense of humor, and was always ready, willing and able to jump into anything offered up choreographically, even if it stretched him on a physical level

His quirk, was drinking.

As most of us were young, naive, and idealistic, we did not often see that behavior in the studio. That is because one can’t dance and be drunk at the same time.
I have seen many dancers that used moments of drinking to cut lose all the self-control and be able to relax. But unlike in Berlin with the Russians, at Ballet West most did not perform in slightly drunken places.

To most dancers, our body is our temple, dancers retain a great deal of self-control and more often than not … do not do the real crazy stuff of excessive drugs.
Mathew was one of those exceptions in the drinking category. At dancer parties he did love to take drinking a bit too far and when he did that he was not his best self.

For years, I had been playing with my tarot cards and attempting to learn to decipher the complex patterns within the images. I was pretty good. But for months, I had been seeing a combination of three cards in an area of a spread called, “the Indirect Future”.

This area in a spread if often not about me but about those around me. It can be about someone else. Such as a particular thing, some situation, or someone that is just on the outside of my purview.
For months the cards had been very dark. Lots of death and things that looked like a calamity.

When three death cards touch or line up … side by side, it is a warning of some impending doom.

I am an optimist by nature, and I did not want to read the cards as dark … as they were appearing.

That was when Mathew had the first car accident.

 

Seems that he had been drinking and decided to drive. But there was work being done on the highway and a bridge was out. They had all the orange cones and signs up. But in his altered state, at night, he literally went off the bridge!
Shockingly he fell and the car landed on its wheels, blowing out all the tires, totaling the car but he was unharmed. Not a scratch on him.

Such a moment is usually a warning from an angel. A moment to wake up and see what one is doing and hopefully to make a correction.

 

The event blew him right out of his altered drunken state and the police did not even test him for alcohol.
I am sure the shock of the accident made him appear alert and normal.

He told me that the police officer said, “It is a miracle that you didn’t die!”

That is the moment when I finally figured out the meaning behind my cards.

I decided it must have been the car accident. And now we should be fine and those terrible cards would go away.

But they didn’t.

It was unnerving. And I wondered what I was not seeing and what was yet to come.

Mathew and his wife, Carol, were to have a baby. And they were very excited about it. His wife was a lovely person, and everyone liked her.

The baby was born (I believe) about 4 or 5 days before we were to leave for Aspen for the Summer.

Mathew was so tickled to be a dad and was trying to do all he could for his wife and the new baby for those few days before all the dancers were going to be on the road to Colorado.

I remember, seeing the baby briefly. Just to give a gift and to congratulate them both.

The baby grabbed my hand and as a palmist, I could not help but take a peek at the palm of this beautiful child’s hand.

To my shock in the middle of this palm of a three-day old child was a 5-pointed star in the center of the palm.

An indication that someone important to this child was going to die.

I tried to deny what I saw. I tried to say inside my mind that it was just a quick glance. And that I could have been not seeing it clearly. Babies are not good at keeping their hands open. They like to clench them tight and grasp at fingers and anything that they can grab.

But I could not shake that feeling.

I have sense learned to not ignore those feelings but at that time … I was young, idealistic, an optimist, and I did not like to entertain ideas that are so dark.

But the angels and guides were trying to warn me.

They were warning me with the cards (which I was denying) and now the palm of the child.
And still, I did not want to see.

The next day, we were all to go to Aspen.

Mathew was taking his own car and so was I.

I did not realize that he was leaving before me.

I got up early. Packed my car and took off.

Happy to be going to one of my favorite places in the world.

The drive was unremarkable, and the scenery is beautiful. I am listening to the radio when I am in the zone of an area that had reception.

When suddenly up ahead, there are police lights, flares on the highway, and the traffic slows to almost a stop.

Clearly, there was something ahead. And as I got closer, I could see it was an accident.

Two cars had hit head on, along a curve in the mountain road.

The cars were mangled together and almost unrecognizable.

Almost!

I glance over and realize that one of the vehicles was Mathews car!

I scream in my head! “No, that can’t be right!”

I look again. And now I am sure it was his car!

My heart is beating so loudly in my ears that I can’t seem to think, much less breathe.
The pounding of my heart is like a drum trying to drown out the truth.

Ambulances have come and gone and all I can see is all the blood.

I see the suitcases scattered and broken open.

The force of the impact was massive, and I had to pull over and stop my car.
I could not think
I knew I was not safe to drive.
But I had to be sure.

I walked back and asked the police officer what happened.

He said that the person in the car heading towards Aspen had fallen asleep at the wheel and had careened into the oncoming traffic and hit someone head on going very fast.

My throat felt like a vice was crushing my windpipe.
My head was spinning and I asked if it was Mathew.

The police officer checked his notes and said “Yes!”

I had to ask, “Is he alive?”

And the officer answered, “No, we believe he was killed on impact! But they rushed him to the hospital trying to save him.”

Everything inside seemed to stop as the fury of the chaotic truth tried to seep in.
I went back to my car and sat there. Too stunned to move until I could get myself back together. Or at least together enough to drive the rest of the way.

It was as if all the energy drained out of my body and I was trying to cope with what all this meant.

I do not remember, the rest of the drive to Snowmass. It is a total blank.

Checking into the condo’s at Snowmass is not even in my memory bank.

The next thing I remember, was another dancer coming in (as 4 dancers shared one condo) and she too had seen the accident and recognized that it was Mathew’s car.

All I could think was, “Okay, I am not making this up. Someone else also saw what I saw.”

As the other dancers came in the word went out and there was a flurry of tears and disbelief.

I went to my room, and I closed my eyes, dropping into a meditative state.

I knew I needed to search for Mathew in the ethers. I wanted to make sure he got to the other side okay.

I found him in my mind, and it appeared as if he believed he was sleeping and dreaming.

Not surprising if he fell asleep at the wheel.

He told me that he was not dead but just resting his eyes as he had been up all night with the baby to help Carol his wife.

I tried to convince him that he had died but he seemed confused and struggling with that piece of information.
I took him to see Carol and the baby. That made him happy. But when he could not touch them, and he saw her crying because clearly the police had told her the news, things began to sink in.

But still … he did not want to believe me.

An angel had showed up at the time of the accident and was also trying to convince him that he needed to come with her.
But he just thought he was dreaming.

She and I took him to the morgue and showed him his body and the angel explained that his body was so mangled that he could not go back into it.

And even then, he resisted.

That is when I called into the light for someone to come to help him and take him to the other side.
And through the doorway of bright light came Toni Lander (the ballet mistress of Ballet West) who had just died in May of that year. Just months before the accident.

I was surprised to see her. She seemed to not notice me but went up to Mathew and took his hand.

Startled he looked at her and said, “Toni! What are you doing here? You are dead!”
And she responded, “So are you!”

That is when it hit him. I could see the recognition in his eyes and the shock beginning to register.

In that moment, light exploded into the space, and it was filled with ancestors and those that loved him. All these souls were trying to support him in the grief that he would never be able to raise his own child and that he was not going to be a part of this earthly existence for a period of time.
That is when the light became so bright that I was pushed out and no longer a part of that scene.
I found myself back in my bedroom in Snowmass.

I sat still in my bed crying.
I began thinking about how much had happened in the previous year.
Much that I will explain in another chapter.
But in a nutshell, that year I had gotten Mononucleosis, and I had been in bed for 3 weeks as
Toni Lander was dying.
I knew she had died because she came to me in a dream, while I was deathly sick. And when the phone rang at my sisters house, and she came into my bedroom, she said to me, “Suzanne I have to tell you some bad news!”

I rolled over and said, “I know, Toni Landar died last night.”

She said incrediously, “How did you know?”
I responded, “I dreamed it!”

 

Going to Aspen, I was not yet fully recovered from this disease. I did not know that I had Chronic Fatigue, which at that time was something that no one knew about.

I had been battling exhaustion that I could not explain and chronic anxiety attacks for a month.

 

Then this accident with Mathew happened and with the added stress and strain, it seemed to push me to my breaking point.

I was clearly in an altered state on many levels and much of that time is blurry and as if I am not fully present watching everything unfold.

 

We were all called to go to rehearsals, because it was clear that the “show must go on”. But our heart and soul were not there.

 

That night we went to perform Sleeping Beauty. Mathew always played in the Puss and Boots Pas De Deux. Miguel Garcia also did Boots and was doing it that night instead of Mathew.

 

I am sitting at the back of the stage, when I suddenly see Mathew dancing behind Miguel. At times they were merging as one. At other moments they were doing their own unique movements and styles.

I looked around to see if others saw what I saw.

I could see tears rolling down the faces of dancers sitting in the back. They too saw something, or were remembering Mathew dancing that roll.

Regardless we were all crying.

We cried because he was our friend.

We cried for a lovely man that would never be able to raise his own child.

We cried for Carol his wife and what she must be going through.

We cried because we did not feel like dancing but “The Show Must Go On!”

We cried because we saw our own mortality and vulnerability.

We cried because we missed Mathews smiling face and sense of humor.

We cried because we did not want to forget him.

 

And yet, he was with us. He was dancing one final time with all of us.
He was showing us that he was okay.
He was showing us that it was okay that the show had to go on.

 

I think of him often.

I have lost track of Carol and that beautiful child.

Sometimes it is easier that way.

But I do not forget.

I remember in my heart that all dancers are spiritual family and that as one leaves, those on the other side will greet us and show us the way back into the light.

~Suzanne Wagner~