I remember it like it was yesterday. It was a sunny August day in 2002, and I watched in horror as Leo, along with his mother, the evil Vanessa Bennett, fell over Miller’s Falls. It took a minute to grasp what had just happened. As Greenlee called out to him over and over again in a complete panic I thought to myself: Surely, Leo could not be dead, but days went by and his body was not recovered. My mother and I waited with baited breath for the news that he would be found alive. The fact that his body, even months later had not been recovered was a tell tale sign that he would, eventually, be found alive. After all, if the body is not recovered than he is almost surely coming back. The last 18 years of my life had taught me that. Even my mom, who had 30 years of experience at that time, was sure that Leo would come back alive. But days turned into weeks and those weeks turned into years and Leo did not come back. And still, my mom and I waited. We waited as Leo’s wife Greenlee fell in love with her once enemy Ryan. We watched as she convinced herself that Leo truly was gone and married Ryan. And still we waited for Leo to come back. I was half expecting him to burst through the doors of Ryan and Greenlee’s wedding just as the minister was asking if there were any objections, but that too did not happen. Finally, we had to come to terms with the fact that Leo was dead. But Greenlee was his soul mate; if he was alive, he would have come back to her. Now it has been 9 years since Leo fell over that edge, and it seems pretty certain that he is indeed gone.

            In case you haven’t figured it out, I am talking about a television show. It is a show I grew up with. It is a show that I had watched almost since the day I was born. I inherited a love for the show from my mother who had watched since it premiered on January 5, 1970, and when its impending cancellation was announced on April 14, 2011, I felt the same sense of denial that I did on the day that Leo died.

There are many childhood television shows that, as adults, we eventually outgrow. We look back with nostalgia and ask our friends, “Do you remember (fill in the blank)? I loved that show.” A lot of the time we can still remember the theme song. We remember that Captain Planet was our hero and that he took pollution down to zero. We remember that the Gummi Bears bounced here and there and everywhere. We discuss amongst our friends the possibly sinister living situation of the Smurfs, and we wonder exactly what the role was of Smurfette in that community. We remember them with love, but they are a part of our past. There is, however, one show from my childhood that I have not outgrown. It is a show which for the last 41 years has been an American institution; it is the show that introduced the world and me in particular to Erica Kane-Martin-Brent-Cudahy Chandler-Montgomery-Montgomery-Chandler-Marick-Marick-Montgomery.

            All My Children has now been a part of my life for 27 years. My sister and I would watch with my mother every day to see what trouble Palmer Cortland and Adam Chandler were causing for each other or better yet, what kind of crazy “Janet From Another Planet” was bringing to Pine Valley. Now this beloved institution has come and end only to be replaced with yet another reality talk show, and as ridiculous as this may sound, it feels as if a piece of my childhood is being ripped unceremoniously away. I am not just losing a television show; I am losing people who have truly become a part of my life. Not only that, I am losing with it the last vestiges of my childhood.

            As soap operas continue to fade into obscurity, we will lose with them more than 60 years of American popular culture. Gone will be the days of super rivals, super couples, people miraculously rising from the dead, and kids leaving town at the age of 3 and magically coming back a few years later as young adults ready to attend the local university. For more than 60 years, mothers have bonded with their daughters, and sometimes sons, while they watched their stories and escaped into an alternate reality where people always have jobs and money to do whatever they want, but somehow never seem to need to go to work.

            Unfortunately, for the last decade or so soaps have begun to slowly disappear, and as I saw Guiding Light go and then As the World Turns go shortly after that, I thought that surely my story was safe. I ignored the rumors and told myself that nothing could take down Erica Kane. After all, she did manage to take on a bear simply by shouting at it her most famous of lines, “I AM ERICA KANE, AND YOU ARE A FILTHY BEAST.” If she could take on a bear with just her words, then surely a few drops in the ratings couldn’t stop her. Alas, I was wrong, and as I prepared to say goodbye to her and the rest of the citizens of Pine Valley, I could help but think about how I will not be able to continue the family tradition that my mom started with me.

            Every day my mother would record All My Children so we could watch it in the evening after she got home from work and we got home from school. The rivalries were a truly fantastic part of the soap tradition. There was one in particular that really highlighted what rivalries were all about. It was the rivalry between Palmer Cortland and Adam Chandler. They truly knew how to hate each other. Their rivalry went back to their childhoods in Pigeon Hollow, WV. They were both powerful businessmen who seemed to lack scruples, would do whatever they needed to do to further their own personal gain, and somehow always seemed to be able to find a way to justify it perfectly. Adam Chandler tried to gaslight not just one wife but two. Palmer kept a cure that would keep his daughter Nina from going blind just so she wouldn’t marry Cliff Warner. These horrible misdeeds may seem despicable, and if we were to hear or read about these things in the real world, we would be disgusted. But for my mother, my sister, and me they were a part of our everyday lives. We not only lived with it, sometimes we even found a way to root for the bad guy because no matter how  bad they were, there was always something redeeming about them. Maybe it was the fact that they would do anything they had to do to keep their family safe. Maybe it was the small instances of insecurity and vulnerability that they so rarely showed. Or maybe they let us live vicariously through their misdeeds because we would never do the things they would do to their enemies no matter how much we may want revenge. But no matter what horrible things Palmer or Adam did to each other or those around him, we loved them, and when Palmer died, we mourned the lovable curmudgeon right along side everyone in Pine Valley.

            For soap fans, it wasn’t just the rivalries that made the soaps so irresistible. The villains were just one part of that. The other part, possibly the even bigger part, were the super couples. Super couples are a part of soap legend, and All My Children truly knew how to make people fall in love with their super couples. In fact, in the 1980’s ABC advertised their soaps by calling them “love in the afternoon” These super couples like Greg and Jenny, Angie and Jesse, Tad and Dixie, Haley and Mateo all had their heyday in the 80s and 90s and even though many of these couples are no longer with the show, their legacy still lives on today. I see it every day on the Facebook soap fan page I am a part of. It has been 25 years since Jenny was tragically killed in a Jet Ski accident, and people still want her to return (because as any soap fan knows, you never truly know who may or may not come back from the dead). Jesse was able to return to his beloved Angie after being dead for 20 years. We watched Jesse and Angie’s tragic Romeo and Juliet love story. Jesse was from the wrong side of the tracks and Angie was a beautiful upper middle class daughter of a prestigious lawyer. We watched as they fell in love, we cried when Jesse tragically died in Angie’s arms, and we rejoiced along with Angie as she discovered that Jesse had been alive for the last 20 years. There is almost nothing soapier than a super couple, and they are a part of this tradition that has made millions of fans fall in love every single day.  

As I look to a future filled with reality TV and talk shows with women gabbing about their children over coffee, I am saddened about this loss of tradition. It is a tradition that I shared with my mother as a child and I still share with her today. I still call my mother up and ask, “did you see what happened on All My Children today? I cannot believe that David did that.” It is a tradition that I won’t be able to share with my own daughters. By the time my own children have children, it is likely that soaps will be a thing of distant memory. They may not even know what soaps were. I will miss Erica Kane and her many husbands, I will even miss the dastardly Dr. David Hayward. I will miss talking about the events of Pine Valley with my mother and friends from all over the country. People find out that I am a soap fan and they laugh, but I know that my love of soaps means that I appreciate and value tradition. Yes it may be just a television show that is to most people just fluff, and maybe to a point it is. But if it was just fluff, I would not have wept copious tears of sorrow on hat fateful September day when it finally did end. To me and the millions of fans who took the journey to Pine Valley every weekday at noon it was more. It was an escape form the everyday mundane. It was a way to bond with their mothers and grandmothers and build with it lasting relationships with not just family, but complete strangers, both fictional and otherwise. Lastly, it was a way to slow down for just an hour and remember that there is more to life than celebrities telling us how we should act, dress, and eat to be better women, wives, and mothers. Life is about the relationships we build and the bonds that can’t be broken, as Angie and Jesse taught us, even by death.

When Agnes Nixon created All My Children she created with it this poem to tell the world what her show was all about:

The Great and the Least,

The Rich and the Poor,
The Weak and the Strong,
In Sickness and in Health,
In Joy and Sorrow,
In Tragedy and Triumph,
You are ALL MY CHILDREN

            For the last 27 years the good people of Pine Valley have let me celebrate their joy and triumphs and mourn with them in sorrow and tragedy. They were the great and the least, and the day I had to say good bye was not be easy, but I also know that I will be able to look back and laugh at my memories of that wacky town where you could escape reality for just an hour and anything was possible.