The Mighty E.

1-19-18

Just got a call from my sister. My brother is fading and going into hospice today. Right before I was on a phone interview for A Thousand Junkies with a woman in the UK. I did it in the coffee shop parking lot and K (my ex-wife) just happened to be parked randomly next to me. Then my sister called back and said “you better get there by tomorrow.” I hung up and started to cry. A confused, helpless kind of crying, like when you want your mommy. Like homesickness. As much terror as grief. I'm supposed to go to Paris for work Thursday, but the big truths are altering the plot. Life is the best writer.

I'd feel really bad if I was still strung out and couldn't show up or made it there but was just another part of the bad news. Taking care of ourselves is a good way to love those we care about most, and who care about us.

I really love my brother. The last time I saw him in Boston, I told him "You're my favorite person ever."  I meant it.

1-21-18

I'm sitting in the breakfast room of the Marriott Residence Inn in Danvers Massachusetts. There are plastic silos of Special K and Fruit Loops, Styrofoam waffles you make yourself, and sad scrambled eggs laying in state in stainless steel mausoleums. Everywhere I look it's death.

The only people in here are the Latina housekeepers.  They get their work done and ignore the hysterical TV. Sharon Stone of all people is telling America how brilliant Steven Soderbergh is, how well her son is doing at college, and how much FUN she had making her last show. Death takes the already surreal and makes it absurdly so.

In the two weeks since I last saw my brother he has gone from a very sick slowly dying version of himself to a mummified man of undetermined age. Actually, his age is determinable. It is eternity. His mouth is gaped like a portal into the void, and every last bit of life and vitality has been sucked from him and diverted to one cause-- His breath. His body now nothing but a breathing machine. It is all hands on deck. 

The folks at the hospice say he is "pre-death" and very soon he will go full death and then we will all go post-death. It is happening. We are all going to die but he is going to die now.

Yesterday, my two sisters and I sat around his bed in the peach-colored room at the Kaplan Family Hospice House and just kept witness. As we sat there with our fading king between us I thought how lucky we were to all care for each other and have this all be about E.  There are no weird side dramas. I know siblings often have falling outs-- Jealousies, resentments and other weirdness, but we were lucky enough to have a mother it took a lot to survive, so, we were bonded in that experience with no spare psychic current left to turn on each other. I was reading “Republic of Suffering,” which is about death and the Civil War. It says a "good death" used to mean dying slowly in bed at home with family around you. So, in his way, E is having a "good" death though a very premature one.

It's an intimate thing to witness. You can be no more vulnerable than he is now. Every so often he momentarily rouses from a deep morphine sleep to find out he is in agony, and that his arms, which are Dachau thin and atrophied, need to be stretched above his head.  Otherwise, his Giacometti hands are locked across his chest holding onto the last crumbs of life and won’t let go-- even if he wants to. I look at him. My older brother. The big strapping hero of my youth now a small, yet still noble old man.

The other day when I got here, I went to the hotel for a minute and while I was gone E woke up and was disoriented because he thought he had come the day before to die, and he asked L (his wife) if it was okay if he died. That they weren't helping him by keeping him alive, and he wanted to go. L came out and said she didn't want him to go, but knew it had to be. Oh, us poor sweet human beings, all moving forward with our very pressing lives. All the loves and cares, and what does this one think of me, and does my hair look good and the rest of our daily concerns, all the while knowing (but not facing) that eventually it will come down to some scene like this.

As for me I just don't like having my structure fucked with. I can get pretty miserable in a Marriott when my feet ache with gout, and I thought I was going to Paris but now death is in the way-- I can be a real selfish fucker and can't E just stop breathing and freak us all out already I mean I got shit to do here.  Those thoughts last a second or two, and I realize I just want to get out of how painful this all is.

My brother was a movie producer, and a great one. As we sit out in the communal hospice eating area, we decide we are not sitting shiva for him and are having a "wrap party" instead. We will laugh to the end.

1-23-18

My brother passed away early this morning at 3:10 A.M. I was not there, but arrived shortly afterward. We sat around his body for several hours and tried to make sense of it. My sister J showed up a bit after us and cried when she walked in. There was some talking and L was very calm and so was N, his son. They had handled it well, (whatever that means) and so had E, and it had happened as it was supposed to. I just sat there silently on a small couch. Finally, I went over and touched his leg and then lowered my head over him and sobbed. Then everybody did the same. It was time. Sometimes we have to see each other grieve to know it's okay, but I wasn't thinking that. I didn't cry long, but like a small boy. It was good, all of us around crying over his still warm body, crying out our love for him, our brother, father, husband.

Last night we all gathered around him and sang him out. We started with We Shall Overcome, went onto I'm Gonna Shine My Light, then Lay Down My Sword and Shield, then a few Beatles songs. S (my son) did a beautiful version of In My Life. Sung it soft and sweet as E chugged away his last breaths. We sang Hey Jude, and Here Comes the Sun. My sisters J and L, and L, his wife, and E’s son N, and K (my ex) and S and me. We sang gathered around him like the Psychopomps-- fairies ushering his soul to the afterlife. We laughed and sang and talked about him, and had a good ol’ bittersweet time.

I want to say that my brother was as decent a person as I have ever met. He was a fair and profoundly compassionate man, and had a dignity and goodness that everyone who met him felt. But he really found his most golden self in the way he dealt with his illnesses. Two! ALS and Pancreatic cancer. Like the five aces of doom. Unthinkable and terrifying to even get one and he got both within months. Somehow, he summoned a radical acceptance that I did not know he had in him. He went into anti-denial, and was shockingly realistic about his situation, and both present and dignified throughout.

His oncologist said that working with E had changed him, that he was amazed by him. Part of me felt like he saw it all as some kind of relief. Not that he was doomed, but that he had come against something that allowed him to surrender with no illusions. He had worked for 30 years as a movie producer. The actual maker of the movie. The guy who has the answers to the nuts and bolts logistics of everything. The one who is supposed to always have a solution to any problem and he finally came up against something where solutions were not even in the picture. He was initiated by fatal illness into the radical acceptance fraternity and he was not scared of death for a second it seemed. Very scared of pain and of the pain and hurt of his loved ones but he looked his fate in the eye like it was a boxing match and this was the stare down. A boxing match where he knew he was going to get his ass kicked, but he stared back anyway. He didn’t want chemo near the end. He just wanted to make it through the summer and sit on a bluff above Cape Cod Bay and watch the light and be with the people he loved as much as possible.

My brother was a force. The dude you want with you in any foxhole or situation but also willing to speak up when you were full of shit or way off or if what you were up to was not in line with his moral center. He was loyal to you but also to the truth and to his sense of right and he was never a fan of displays of grandiosity and ego. He was humble. He was on the side of the gardener, not the guy with the great big lawn. He remained true to his Workers’ Party DNA and it wasn't theory or politics. He was decency in action. I know many of us have been surrounded by left-leaning thinkers who said they were humanists or pacifists or a hundred different labels of progressive, but E was the real living incarnation of dignity for all. He walked the line between the little guy and big guy in his job and in his life. Everyone's experience was to be respected.  He showed me how to be when I was a kid, and he showed us all how to die in this last year or two. I’m not even just saying that in a fit of feeling for the cat, he really handled his impending demise like it was simply another chapter of the book. It didn't change who he was except to soften him and make him even more loving and tender. More who he was meant to be. He raised the notion of being a mensch to a soul art. He was a dignity artist.

Ezra Swerdlow on Emmys.com