THE END

“It’s OK,” I told him. “you can go now. I love you.” 

All five kids were now in our big, airy master bedroom with me, on and around the King-sized bed. Amy, my husband Gary’s oldest daughter from his first marriage, had only arrived from upstate New York at midnight. It was now, what, 3 AM? Amy’s preppy, can-do brother Josh had been a champ, schmoozing the airlines so they’d help with flights and not charge us a fortune. Josh knew how to get shit done! His father’s son. Amy and Josh’s middle brother Jax (formerly Katie) had flown in from Minneapolis that morning. Not such a hassle since he worked loading luggage for American Airlines and could fly standby free of charge. He’d shown up unshaven, in rumpled clothes, but sober, and he hadn’t fought with Josh so far, thank God.

Amy had been sprawled on the bed talking to her Dad since she arrived. He was unable to open his eyes or speak anymore, but Amy later told me she knew he’d heard her because he’d been squeezing her hand. The hydraulic bed was propped up to facilitate her Dad’s shallow breathing. The oxygen machine whirred at the bedside. Gary had grown unrecognizable, so thin. He was always freezing now, but could not stand the weight of blankets, so the bedroom fireplace was blasting heat toward his emaciated frame; a linen sheet was pulled up to his chest, a padding of bath towels beneath him. Time had become fluid. In the wee hours, all the lights were still on, and my son Nick, Amy’s half-brother, was across the room on the leather couch under the window, playing his Dad’s favorite music from a laptop, his sister Chloe, just 19, next to him. My sweet red-haired babies. Nick had been in the room for the last 48 hours straight, playing Neil Young, Jackson Browne, The Who, the Beatles, Queen, and all the rest of the artists Gary loved most. 

Music was EVERYTHING to Gary. It had given him a life beyond anything a poor, abused kid from Ft. Wayne, Indiana could ever dare dream of. He’d gone from working in a local record store as a teenager to working WITH all his musical heroes later in life. Some had become close friends. Early this morning one of his rockstar pals BEGGED me to let him come and say goodbye. I’d had to turn him down. I knew Gary would never want to be remembered this way. Yesterday had been the last day visitors were allowed. Today I had phoned a dozen people — some of whom were en route to airports — to tell them not to come, that Gary was unconscious and the end was near. ALL I cared about was keeping him comfortable and getting all 5 kids there. I was too focused on that to worry about how and when my husband would actually die. I’d held onto hope for so long. I had held. I hadn’t broken down. Now the moment had come, the moment he and I had spent almost two years trying to prevent, putting all our energy and resources into keeping him alive.

His once-strong right hand — bony, cold and still, was in my right hand. His wedding ring, now much too large, which had been sitting on the nightstand for months, was in my left hand. He had beautiful, elegant long fingers. He'd been such a big, powerful man. Cancer had devoured him. When the emergency room nurse last weighed him, he’d lost 130 lbs. How could it be that only days ago, we were in the hospital, him sitting up, still sharp, when the doctor answered his question with, “Yes, Gary, you ARE dying. Don’t you want to go home, rather than stay in this hospital?” Gary had immediately said yes, and we’d moved him here. Our room filled up with medical equipment: the breathing apparatus, commode, wheelchair. Hospice nurses around the clock. The bedside table full of morphine vials and high dosage fentanyl patches, which were so potentially lethal the nurses had to wear gloves when applying them. They were needed to keep the excruciating pain at bay. The cancer had moved from his esophagus to his lungs, to his ribs. He was in agony every moment he was conscious those last days. His suffering was unspeakable. Watching him deteriorate was unbearable, so when the soft-spoken Jamaican nurse said it was time to gather, I was relieved. The kids were sobbing, except Chloe, who held everything in. Always. 

“It’s OK,” I told him. “You can go now. I love you.”  I leaned down to kiss my husband’s forehead… and I felt him leave. 

I AM HERE

     So the writing assignment for class today was: Write like you talk. Yeah, OK. Well lately when I talk I use a lot of what my strict Catholic grandma called "foul language." I curse a lot. It may seem lazy and sound angry. I don’t think I’m either of those things, but if looks like I am to other people I don’t fucking care. Grief looks like what it looks like. I’m not lazy, I’m paralyzed. I’m not angry, I’m heartbroken. However I sound or look to other people, I really don’t give a rat's ass. I’m just trying to survive. Actually that’s not true. I am trying to model survival for my son. He’s the one I am concerned about, not me. My daughter is a story for another day. 

     Maybe I should back up. Yeah, I curse a lot. My husband would say to me: “the use of profanity does not enhance your argument.” I’d tell him to fuck off. It was a little schtick we did. Did. Past tense. He’s dead… and I say fuck a lot. I’m not pissed though. I do say Fuck Cancer angrily, but everyone says it that way, don’t they? I have no energy to be angry. I never did. I was too busy trying to keep him alive…  and when all chemo and radiation and surgery and living in a darkened hotel room in Boston, and later running around the country (on what I called our “shopping for hope tour”) didn’t work…  when the cancer came back with a vengeance anyway and we tried a different chemo and then finally immunotherapy… when ALL that was going on, I was never angry. I wasn’t paralyzed then either. I was on a mission. 

     A dear friend helped connect us to the best surgeon in the country for my husband's type of cancer, at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, attached to Harvard. I let those hard-ass Boston Irish nurses taunt me while I tried to learn to operate the pump attached to his feeding tube. “Looks like you’re pretty nervous about this, aren’t you? Squeamish, huh?” I knew they wanted to get a rise out of me, but I was not going to let them make me mad or make me cry, though both seemed appealing. I just bit my own tart Irish tongue and told them “show me again. I’ll get it.” And I did get it. I set my alarm to ring every 4 hours around the clock so I could go into the hotel bathroom, measure out the liquid medications, then cut and grind the pills, pulverizing them, dissolving them in water, pouring the solution through a tea strainer provided by room service so no chunks would clog the feeding tube and send us to the ER (as happened on the first day after my husband came “home” to the hotel from the hospital). He wasn’t happy with me that day or a lot of other days during that month. He was often furious during that November spent living in a suite overlooking Boston Common — even a Ritz Carlton can be a prison — and he took it out on his only available target, me. But I understood. He couldn’t eat. He was scared and suffering. He was fighting for his life. He was determined to live. He really thought if he came at cancer with the same focus and drive that had made him such a success in business, he couldn’t possibly die. But he died. He was diagnosed on July 14, 2015… and he died on March 27, 2017. He went through hell. He fought like hell. They took out 1/3 of his stomach and 2/3 of his esophagus, and he was willing to live a horrible, diminished existence just to stay alive. Just to be here with me and the kids. But the cancer ended up in his lungs and his ribs and God knows where else and he lost 130 lbs. and he wasted away and he fucking died. 

     And now I am back living in L.A. trying to keep my kid going. He’s devastated at the loss of his dad, who was also his best friend. I’m not all that happy to be back in L.A.— I was comfortable living at the beach in Encinitas. Life was easy there. But my son is here. And I knew if I stayed where I was, I would stay where I was. I am trying to move forward, but it’s fucking hard. It’s been almost 2 years, but it might as well have been two weeks. I work at cultivating gratitude. I had a great love for nearly 25 years. My husband arranged to have flowers sent to me all during the year after he died. He was THAT guy. But he’s gone and I have to keep going. I have no idea where I fit in the world anymore. I had a huge, exciting life. Now my life is small and quiet. No whining, just adjustment. So I am here. Trying to prop up my son, who struggled to find his way even before his Dad died. Not uncommon for sons of hugely charismatic, successful fathers… especially if the kid is on the quiet side, a musician who lives in his head. So I am here because I adore my son. I get up every morning and try to show him how to face the unknown. Suit up and show up as we say in sobriety. Together we try to find peace, and even happiness, every. fucking. day. And I am here. 

IN MY CUPS

     Back in my 20s I terrorized this town… I used my short skirts, long legs, and quick wit to get me out of all kinds of jams. It worked for a few years. I thought I was having fun, but I would find myself in bad situations, including being shoved in the hatchback of my own sports car and driven at high speed through the streets of Hollywood by my boyfriend-of-the-moment who believed he was in better shape to drive than I was. I would come to in other towns, with people I did not recognize. I would come to on the floor of my bathroom, where I would curl up on the cold tile, waiting for the spinning to stop… or not. I would come to understand that things were not going to get better with age and maturity. I needed to fucking stop the downward spiral… but I couldn’t. I crashed parties, I crashed film premieres, I crashed cars… I crashed into the neighbors’ garbage cans when leaving my cousin’s house in a drunken stupor in the middle of a Sunday afternoon, knocking them into a ravine where they could not be retrieved… not that I was in any shape to even TRY to retrieve them. I could not retrieve myself. After all the many dangerous, humiliating things I had done, it was the fucking garbage cans that did me in. I had had enough. 

     I crashed. I didn’t actually REMEMBER what I had done at my cousin's. I was in a blackout. The acquaintances (I had no real friends left) who had been only too happy to help themselves to the booze in my vacationing cousin’s guest house filled me in on my antics when my head cleared a bit later that evening back at my apartment. I was furious at them for telling me and made them leave.

Crumpled on the floor of my shower, I shivered under a cold drizzle, the hot water having run out as I tried to wash away the shame and self-loathing… again. I had caused much worse incidents than this thing with the garbage cans dozens of times. But somehow on that day I realized that my wild child drunken behavior was going to lead me to a pathetic, ugly end. What kind of end? I didn’t know, but I felt disaster looming at my shoulder like some sort of horrible demon whenever I was sober… which wasn’t nearly often enough. Something had to give. 

This was in the Spring of 1986. I was working for a hotshot agent at William Morris. My boss was, unsurprisingly, annoyed when I would show up at my desk outside his office wearing the same clothes as the day before, make-up smeared, disheveled, reeking. Many a morning he would walk by me, shaking his head as he briskly entered his office and began barking orders for me to start lining up calls to writers, directors, studio heads. As long as I did my job well — and remarkably, I did — he seemed content to stay out of my personal affairs. 

On the morning after the garbage can debacle, when I was looking particularly rough, he glanced at me longer than usual on his way to his desk. I could hear him put down his briefcase and rummage through a drawer. He exited his office without a word. He came back a few minutes later bearing a styrofoam coffee cup. Odd, he NEVER got his own coffee, and he never drank from lowly styrofoam. As he neared my desk, he stopped and turned the cup to face me. On it in blue ballpoint pen he had drawn the face of a woman with a wild mass of curly hair. He had taken a highlighter and tinted her skin yellow, and with a red pen had rendered her eyes bloodshot. Faking hand tremors, intentionally spilling some of the water he’d put in the cup, he extended it to me and said, “why don’t you try to choke down a few sips of water, little missie?” I accepted the cup in horror, as the other assistants looked on. He stalked into his office, calling out, “Get me Julien Temple right now.” I put the cup down and started dialing. Some assistants snickered, but not too loudly. Many of them behaved as badly as I did. 

I didn’t stop drinking that day, and I didn’t stop to wonder WHY I was so self-destructive, so unconcerned with my own future. But I did stop by the mail slot and throw in a letter to my cousin so it would be waiting for her when she returned to town. I told her about the garbage cans. I told her I needed help. I told her I was in trouble. I TOLD. I was a mess. I had been a mess for years. Long before the drinking started. Maybe even before my best friend’s father began touching me in ways he shouldn't when I was still a child. Maybe since birth. My cousin got me help. I finally faced myself and asked WHY. And everything changed. That was April 16, 1986. I am sober to this day.

                                          EPILOGUE

I moved on to another job after I realized that, sober, I had NO desire to train to be an agent. About 18 months after I left William Morris, that hotshot agent stuck his head into the office at the movie studio where I was then working, saying he’d had a meeting down the hall and seen my name of the door, so he had to stop in. He gave me a big grin. He hardly ever smiled at me when I worked for him. No wonder! I invited him in. The actor I read scripts for was out of town shooting a film, so we were able to sit in the inner office and talk. After awkward pleasantries, I told him that I needed to make an amends to him, that I was now over a year sober, and that I was sorry for not being the best employee I could have been. What an understatement! He was so kind I was taken aback. He told me his own family had been affected by alcoholism, and that he was proud of me for turning my life around when I was still so young. My eyes teared up. I told him that I had taken that styrofoam cup home with me the day he gave it to me and put it in my kitchen cupboard so that every time I opened it, I was faced with myself. The cup was still there. I thanked him for giving me that wake-up call. We chatted for a few more minutes and then he left. I have not seen him since. 

Even after our talk, I kept that styrofoam cup. In January of 1994 it was crushed when a massive earthquake hit L.A. and the contents of my kitchen cupboards came crashing to the floor. I wish I’d taken a photo of it before it got destroyed, but it served its purpose. 

Sober, but still sporting those short skirts. Flaunt it while you've got it! Circa 1990/1991... The Propaganda-Satellite Films gang on the way to the VMAs... Top video director Mark Romanek, Production Coordinator - moi, and Executive Producer Larry Perel... long legs, short skirts, BIG hair, good times!