Tony Fitzpatrick, a Chicago treasure: 'You notice how lucky you are'

"I'm playing with house money, pal," Tony Fitzpatrick told one of the conga line of well-wishers who visited his hospital room last week. "If this winds up being it, I got way farther than anybody ever thought I would, including me."

That he did.

Tony, who died of heart failure at Rush University Medical Center on Saturday, was a renowned artist, writer and actor. His work is in the collections of The Art Institute, the Museum Contemporary Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and others. He published books of stories and poetry, and starred in the television series "Patriot," in Spike Lee's "Chi-Raq" and on stage at Steppenwolf. He had a relentless work ethic.

"I'm not done yet," he said, three days before he died.

Tony was guiltlessly commercial, his art appearing on album covers, puzzles and beer cans. Despite being gravely ill with lung disease, he was pushing boxes of holiday cards on Facebook. Why bother?

"What are we going to do?" he replied, "Sit around and go, 'Poor me!'"

Not Tony's way. He needed a pair of lungs. Yet he was still working on a screenplay with his children, Max and Gaby.

Tony adored birds, which figure prominently in his work, colorful renditions surrounded by wild collages of ephemera.

"They are miraculous," wrote Helen Macdonald, author of "H is for Hawk." "In their frames they perch amongst the symbolic and material detritus of our lives: constellations, jewels, staves, flowers, logos, cartoon figures crossword squares. Eyes, faces, hands, and stars flicker and burn around them. So do epigrams and notions and scrolls of fiercest poetry. The more you look at these pictures, the more things change and speak inside them. ... They are pictures of birds. But they are also lessons in nostalgia, history, love and hurt."

Tony was fearlessly political, always outspoken, a generous patron and unshakable friend. Countless times he lent encouragement, support and gallery space to new artists. In the weeks before his death, he shared a chain of photographs on social media praising the kindness of the medical staff at Rush.

"They've been amazing," he said. "I feel so good being around them. These are the best people in the world. This calm sort of extra expanded humanity."

That was Tony, too.

"The generosity," marveled Bill Savage, a professor at Northwestern. "He spoke to my Chicago Way class at NU one year, and one of my students was in the program and struggling. He sat with that kid after class for a good long time, talking sobriety. The student told me later it made a huge difference for him."

Tony has recently been cheering on Ted Kooser, an 86-year-old Great Plains poet. For Tony, that meant being driven to Nebraska last month to visit Kooser for 90 minutes.

I asked Kooser, who won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and was the U.S. poet laureate, to assess Tony's writing. Kooser wrote: "His poetry made me think of those circus acts where somebody rides a bicycle through a flaming hoop and rides on with streamers flying behind him. His poems had that sort of raw energy."

"He is a Chicago legend who belongs next to all the names we say, like Royko and Studs and Sandburg and Algren," said historian Thomas Dyja. "And now Fitzpatrick."

Days from death, Tony spoke of gratitude.

"I'm not going to bitch, man, I'm not going to kick," he said. "At a certain point, you notice how lucky you are."

The topic turned to Catholicism, and he paraphrased Timothy 4:7 — "I have run the race; I have done my best," adding. "I don't have a deity. I don't have an imaginary friend in the sky. I don't believe in an afterlife. I believe in spirits, nature."

A visitor told him he must get better, because he'd already been to four funerals this summer and had no intention of going to another.

"I'm not going to have one," Tony said. "You know, what I'm thinking is having a big gathering in Humboldt Park. Spreading some ashes but giving little bags of Tony to all my buddies. You, go to Paris. You, go to New Orleans. You, go to New York City, corner of 7th and B, I'd like to spread myself around."

Already done. The enthusiastic, kind, creative soul of Tony Fitzpatrick has been spread far and wide, framed on walls, shelved in libraries, taught in classes, secreted in minds and hearts.

If we measure life by the people we touch, then Tony lived centuries, and his life will go on in the many people who cherish him and his work. The man himself has taken flight and left us, that's all. Rather like a bird.