Anyway, I’ve thought since then that this is one of the best ideas in the world for a movie: the quest to get your very confused, very stoned “Puff Daddy” a hooker. Who do you give to the man who is about to lose everything? He couldn’t even get a blow job because he was past the point where anyone with a decent blow job would consider hiring him.
I had heard that once an older person—and especially an older infirm person—falls and breaks his hip, it’s just a matter of time before he passes away. And not all that much time, the proverbial “they” say. So you can appreciate my concern when Sarah called one morning in mid-September to tell me that my father, who, despite having been unable to walk for the past five or six years due to a series of strokes and a beyond-obsessive devotion to the daily smoking of marijuana, had somehow forgotten the nonnegotiable fact of his irrevocable and enduring immobility. And, so, on this particular sunny Berkeley morning, he had risen to greet the day and, swinging his useless legs over the side of his bed, stood up for a nanosecond before falling and breaking his hip. And, naturally, my Eddie, being so much more than some average everyday ordinary Eddie, didn’t just break his hip—he broke it sort of in the place that prevents someone of his age from spending more than another week or two on the planet.
So now we all knew that it was only a matter of time before we’d lose him. Somehow, though, I expected that the time he had remaining would be somewhat longer. And because of that unreliable assumption, I wasn’t with him the night that he suddenly up and expired. And though there’s something ironically perfect that after a lifetime of enduring his absences I wasn’t present for his death—well, this somehow continues to haunt me. I don’t mean that he haunts me. I just wish I had been there. I wish it wasn’t just another missed opportunity with Eddie. Only unfortunately this time, it turned out to emanate from my end.
Was this my unconscious way of giving him a taste of his own ever-elusive, intoxicating presence? Maybe. I like to think not, though. I prefer to imagine that I’m not that obvious. Let me dream.
But by the end, it turned out that the overseeing of my father’s care had ultimately fallen to me. And I’d come to be very grateful for this fumble. I mean, we both knew I was under no obligation to arrange and oversee his care. Whatever I did for him was because I wanted to. Not as some kind of payback that, as my dear old doting dad, was his due.
But he actually had been there when I had entered this world. The story goes that he watched me being born. And, though he fainted from the offensive horror of it, he was really there at the beginning of our shared time on the planet, just as I wasn’t there at the end of it. Like I said, we both knew that I didn’t owe him anything. But owing didn’t have any place in this. I owed it to who we’d come to mean to each other in the seven or eight years leading up to his death.
And so, yes, I do regret that I wasn’t there to hold his hand at the end. I regret that I wasn’t there to gaze at him with tender, anxious eyes. Go figure. Maybe I’m just quirky that way. But there’s something else that factors its way onto this missed death bed boat before it left the harbor.
The thing is, I’ve helped people die. Not that they couldn’t have done it without me. And lord knows all too many people end up doing it alone. But I’ve kept my fair share of vigils at the bedsides of those with only a few moments, or days, or weeks to spare. I know many folk that might find this a fairly daunting proposition, but there’s something in that final fatal situation that I understand completely. I know what’s required inherently of me, and I know that I’ll do everything to be equal to this considerable situation. Everyone understands their role. One stays until the other can’t anymore. And the one who won’t be able to stick around is much more important than the one who can. And I find relief in the understanding and acceptance of the unspoken urgency in this arrangement. I’ll love them until they can’t be loved anymore in this whatever you call it… what’s the word? Dimension? Plane? Could it be as riotlessly new-agey as that?
In any event, I have accompanied several of my friends to that place where they can’t be escorted any longer. Where you remain with a dying person, accompanying them as far as you can go, ultimately finding yourself standing still while they’ve kept moving. Moving until that place where they stop, arriving at that terrible stillness that goes on way longer than any life someone might have led. You continue leading your life while they follow theirs into the great beyond. Being and nothingness. You love them until they can’t feel loved anymore, then you keep on loving them as if they were still there—as if there’s been a reprieve at the last moment and fate has reversed itself. It all turned out to be a bad dream that you both had and now get to wake from.
My friend Julian was the first. Julian needed a prom date to take him to the dance that he wouldn’t return from, his last waltz. Julian was one of the earliest sufferers of the AIDS virus in New York. Born in Australia, he’d moved to Manhattan, where he eventually came to work for Paul Simon’s business manager at the time, Ian Hoblyn.
When Paul and I split up for the last time, I moved back to Los Angeles, which is where Julian contacted me a short time later to see if he could stay with me before he continued on to Australia, where his family would then care for him. But what we didn’t know—but probably should have, could have, guessed at—was that the flight from New York to Los Angeles would take whatever vitality that Julian could lay claim to. So for him to now get on yet another even longer flight to go somewhere else that was even farther away… Well, that was just a thing that wasn’t going to happen.
So a new plan had to be devised. And that plan included Julian staying with me for several weeks or more—until staying anywhere fell outside Julian’s formerly considerable skill set. One night Julian threw up what must have been about a pint of bright red blood into a stark white bowl. Then, in response to my 9-1-1 call—or rather, shriek—four men arrived at my home wearing what appeared to be space suits, from their fishbowl helmets to their Pillsbury Doughboy outfits, complete with inflated gloves and boots. And these four men drove Julian to a hospital over the hill into the valley where he spent his remaining days in and out of consciousness with his sister, a male nurse, and me by his side. Making that final transition from wherever he was to wherever he was going, there I was, his friend and devotee, learning as I—or as he—went, so I could potentially use this daunting skill set again at a later date. And as we watched, his nurse said quietly, “It won’t be long now. He’s gone into reverse labor. He’s starting to die.” And die he did. Death had come to take him.
But it wasn’t entirely selfish. After death takes someone from you, it gives you something back. It makes smells sharper and the sun brighter and sex more urgent. It’s as though you’re living for two now. Their memory lives inside you, and you feed it. You live for them now that they can’t anymore. So given the choice between Julian and the rest of us, death chose our friend, our loved one, over us. He took the bullet, and we were left standing there with our empty guns, watching a tiny cloud of smoke barely making its way out of the barrel.
Michael was next. This is what I found myself thinking at his death bed, located between his death chair and death end table. There he was on his last legs, last words, last laughs. It was Michael’s turn to be the first to cross over the finish line. Would he be waiting patiently up ahead for our inevitable arrival? Exhausted from running our own last lap, would he be there to ease us into death as we’d eased him out of life?