Paul Linke was sitting in the garden of an inn in Santa Monica recently. Above him, the sun dazzled off purple flowers where a bee was buzzing happily. The brightness in Linke’s face fit right into this California scene. With a full head of silver hair and and lively swimming-pool-blue eyes, Linke seemed invincibly cheerful. Even his smile radiated with Hollywood gleam.

Only thing is, he was talking about his wife’s breast cancer.

“Francesca noticed the lump when she was nursing our second son,” said Linke, a TV and stage actor. “It wasn’t her first lump, but she had gotten rid of the last one homeopathically and it went away. The second time it didn’t.”

In 1986, Francesca Draper, Linke’s wife of eight years, died of breast cancer at age 37. Her story — and his — are the theme of “Time Flies When You’re Alive,” a one-man show Linke developed a year after Francesca’s death and has been presenting professionally onstage for more than 10 years.

Linke will bring the 90-minute drama to Camden Nov. 13, as part of a tribute Penobscot Bay Medical Center is paying to the local women and families whose lives have been affected by breast cancer. The show is also a fund-raiser with proceeds going to cancer care organizations as well as to pay for mammographies.

“Time Flies” grew out of the eulogy Linke delivered at Francesca’s memorial service several weeks after her death. The event was held at the home of actor John Ritter and his then-wife Nancy, and more than 250 people attended. Family members and friends were struck by the power of Linke’s ad-lib speech. Afterward, a director asked if Linke might be interested in refiguring his experience into a sketch — a la Spalding Gray — for the stage. A year later, Linke did a 10-minute monologue as a fund-raiser for The Powerhouse, a theater he helped establish in the Los Angeles area.

Eventually, Linke expanded the show to include more details about Francesca’s life — her three home births, her work as a musician, and her desperate insistence on fighting cancer holistically. After a mastectomy, Francesca refused chemotherapy and radiation, and chose vitamin treatment at a Mexican clinic.

Many of her closest friends, as well as Linke, were outraged that she would not treat the disease with more medical aggressiveness.

“I was angry that out of fear and denial, she kept thinking the lump was a calcified milk duct,” said Camden resident Lucinda Zeising, a bridesmaid in the Linke-Draper wedding and a member of the team who put the upcoming event together. “She had a block about being open to anything medical.”

But Zeising reiterated what several friends of the family know: Francesca was a devout believer in spiritual, organic living. She would not fight poison with poison.

When she died in 1986, Linke was by her side and wiped the last tear from her eye.

“All in all, she went out like a Viking,” said Ritter, who knows Linke from college days at Southern California University and whose three youngest children are exactly the same age as Linke’s. “What Paul has done is take her point of view and his point of view and the comments of people around them and made it all into a piece. The first night he did it was the first time I cried, the first time I could release all the pain about Francesca’s death. You just don’t deal with stuff like this, with confrontations of the common truths about death. But that’s typical Paul to be so open and honest.”

It was Ritter and Nancy who helped move the show into a larger venue and give it a place among respected one-man shows. Since then, Ritter has seen the piece many times. Despite the fact that the force behind the play is the death of Francesca — or Chex, as she was called — the overriding message is one of triumph, say those who have seen it.

“My fear was that the show would leave you bummed out,” said Ritter. “But this is an amazing story, one of the greatest, most unforgettable pieces of theater you’ll ever see. It’s almost like the origin of theater. Our ancestors — great, great, great to infinity — sitting around the cave and one guy stands up and says: Let me tell you what happened to me. And it’s spelllbinding. That was the first theater of man. Somebody saying this is my journey and within my journey you might find meaning in your life.”

A few years ago, the director and actor Charles Nelson Reilly saw the HBO version of “Time Flies” and called Linke to congratulate him on the piece.

“I thought: `How dare someone do a one-person play better than I do,’ ” said Reilly, who also lives in California. “He was capable of making a great play out of nothing because he has a great gift. It’s not at all depressing. Not at all. It’s a celebration of life.”

Since that first phone call, Reilly has directed Linke in what has now become the “Time Trilogy,” a series of monologues including Francesca’s story, a second about Linke’s return to dating after being widowed, and a third about the relationships between fathers and sons. (Linke’s father, Richard O. Linke, is a TV producer responsible for spearheading such programs as “The Andy Griffith Show,” “Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.” and “Matlock.”)

Linke, who is best-known to TV audiences as the know-it-all motorcycle cop in the series “CHiPs,” has also directed Reilly in the autobiographical one-man show, “The Life of Reilly.”

Linke has also picked up his life and moved on. Between acting gigs, he teaches school. In the years since Francesca’s death, he has become a Mister Mom of sorts, car pooling the kids and grappling with a young family. The children are now 19, 17 and 14. In 1991, Linke married actor Christine Healy, and they have since had a daughter, who is 6.

Linke smiled as he told stories about each of the children and of his own return to joy. The show, he said, is a testimony to life’s strongest feelings.

“When you walk out of there, you will be celebrating your own life,” said Linke.

Paul Linke will perform “Time Flies When You’re Alive” 7:30 p.m. Nov. 13 at the Camden Opera House. Tickets, which are $15, are available at the door or by calling 596-8443.