I See You Made an Effort: Compliments, Indignities, and Survival Stories from the Edge of 50

by Gurwitch, Annabelle

  I’d been doing this meditation in times of stress for years, but it wasn’t until I lay in Robin’s bed that I realized it might actually be a preparation for the Big Relaxation and that it might not be a bad idea to skip the part about returning to your body, but I couldn’t bring myself to do that. She didn’t need me to decide for her when to go.

  The words of the dying hold a special power. Famous last words are oft quoted, even if they aren’t true. Jefferson lives, John Adams supposedly proclaimed, the rivalry between these two Founding Fathers following him to the death. I imagine his real last words were probably I’m so uncomfortable . . . water, hot, where? Some non sequitur. But we like this idea, the it-all-makes-sense-now moment that connects you to the dying, which gives their life meaning and in turn gives your life meaning and thus It All Makes Sense. I’m not going to lie and say these were her last words, but during one of these last visits, she clutched my hands and these were four of the last words I can remember her saying to me.

  “Learn from my life.”

  I nodded my head, cried, and promised I would in the way that you do to the dying.

  But what did she mean? Learn from my life? She should have married Bacon Man? Would things have been different? Would years of consuming even more pork products have sped up or slowed down what might have been the inevitable? Should she have moved to France? Would she have gotten pancreatic cancer if she’d taken up residence in a wine cave? Wouldn’t we be having the same conversation in a room with fewer windows?

  Learn from my life.

  The only thing I was learning was just how much suffering a relatively small collection of fast-growing cells can cause.

  Soon, she wasn’t eating and didn’t want visitors, just the inner circle. She was wrung out. We all were. It was bleaker than a Lars von Trier film. It was a Friday morning when 828-3886 appeared on my cell phone.

  “Is this the call?”

  “This isn’t that call, but Robin says she needs help and this is the weekend she wants to do it.” It was another member of her inner circle. I didn’t think twice. I told my husband and son I didn’t know when I’d be back, packed an overnight bag and rushed out of the house. I knew what was being asked of us, even if it wasn’t spelled out. We all did. This was going to be The Good Death, carefully orchestrated, carried out by loved ones. One by one, her five closest girlfriends arrived and the hospice worker retreated into Robin’s spare bedroom.

  Robin was skeletal. I would never have recognized her if she weren’t propped up in her own bed. She was dressed in a white nightshirt. Her sheets and blankets, all white. We gathered in her bedroom. This was the group that never made it to France with her. The air was charged with adrenaline and sorrow. Later I would wonder if we weren’t all anticipating the relief that soon this ordeal would be over for us as well. One of the girlfriends opened up a bottle of Drusian Prosecco.

  “I hope that’s not my good stuff,” Robin hoarsely whispered.

  “What are you saving it for!?” we all said at the same time.

  We toasted her. We kissed her. We told her we loved her. It really felt like a celebration as we started upping her pain medication.

  The plan was vaguely expressed to me, but as I understood it, she would fall into a coma and her do-not-resuscitate order was in place. I wasn’t really clear on the legal ramifications of what we were doing—I’m still not—but each of the five of us pushed the pump as we stood by the bed. Each one of us wanted to make sure our fingerprints would be on the button on the morphine drip. We didn’t want any one person to be culpable.

  “We should really confuse things—let’s put the dog’s paw on the pump!” someone exclaimed. It might have been me—I think it was me, but it was hard to tell; we were giggling and crying and working together as one unit.

  This is exactly the way I want to go, I said to myself: in a circle of love.

  By this point she had Paxil, Wellbutrin, morphine, oxycodone and Haldol in her system and still she was totally lucid.

  “You’re incredibly drug resistant,” someone said. “You should have done heroin!” Okay, I said that. Her first job out of college had been as a page on Saturday Night Live, working with some of the great drug addicts of all time. Oh, the parties she’d excused herself from. If only she’d known. Was this the learn-from-my-life moment?

  We sat by the bed while Robin dozed on and off for the next few hours, but she wasn’t going under. Every time she stirred, all five of us would jump to help. If she wanted her mouth swabbed or needed to throw up, we attended to her needs. If someone had told me the night we met in 1989, throwing back drinks in a Century City screening room to celebrate the comedy special that she’d produced, that one day I’d be pumping morphine into an IV drip into this vibrant woman’s arm, I would never have believed it.

  “I finally have my big Hollywood moment. If I get an itch, I have five people to scratch it.”

  It was almost midnight when we began to make plans for the inevitable and we realized we faced a twenty-first-century predicament. We didn’t have the password to her computer. I suggested “Languedoc,” a wine region in France that Robin loved and that’s hard to spell but awfully fun to say, but that didn’t work. We tried the name of her niece, other grape varieties and even artisanal cheeses—Mothais, Idiazabal and Zamorano. Nothing.*

  “Wake up, Robin. You can’t die yet, we don’t know your password.” I shook her awake. She looked at us and with perfect deadpan comic timing, she told us, “It’s Robin.”*

  We puffed her pillows, smoothed her comforter and settled in for the night. I stretched out in the hallway outside her bedroom with another friend. The other three women were camped out in the living room. A baby monitor was turned up so we could keep tabs on her. It was three a.m. when we heard her. She was close to falling into that deeper level of sleep that would lead to the big sleep, but she kept rousing herself. She called. Two of us went in to her.

  “I need to get up and walk. I need interaction,” she said as she tried to lift herself up.

  “No, Robin, you can’t get up,” my cohort said flatly.

  Something inside me went numb. I said nothing. Silently, robotically, I shifted her position on the bed. I tucked her in tightly. I turned my back to her. I walked out of her bedroom and closed the door behind me.

  Only later would I remember how utterly fragile she looked. How totally dependent she was on us. How her bony hands had pulled at her nightshirt to cover herself when I moved her. How her swollen genitals were a shade of deep purple, like raw liver. How her attempt at modesty was the last gesture I would witness from my friend of twenty-two years.

  No more for you. That’s what we were telling her and telling ourselves. I hadn’t gently guided her to “just let go.” I’d cut her off. What is the right word for the complete absence of anything funny?

  It did not All Make Sense, and she couldn’t let go. Just let go. By seven a.m., after a fitful sleep, one of the girlfriends realized we had a problem. Or, rather, we were the problem. “She’s not going to be able to do this unless we leave; she’s going to keep reaching out for us and it’s only going to get harder. On all of us,” she said. One by one, we departed.

  The call came the next morning. Only the hospice nurse was at her home at the time of her death.

  During the days that followed I became furious with Robin. Why did she ask this of us—I wasn’t even her “real” family! I’m a comedienne; I’m the last person you’d want to decide when and how you should depart this lifetime. Maybe I’d misunderstood what she’d wanted, she was on so many drugs. Maybe what she’d really wanted was for me to beg her to hold on and keep fighting? Why hadn’t I said good-bye when it really was the time for good-bye? It was supposed to end in a circle of love! I was racked with guilt.

  Robin’s obituary read that she’d fought hard but lost her battle with cancer. Learn from my life?
One thing I learned is that if I ever get cancer, I’d prefer it chronicled like this: she lived it up as long as she could, then bitched and moaned and cried and cursed her fate like everyone who has cancer.

  Her blood relations arrived to close up her affairs, pack up the family silver, the china and the good jewelry. They oversaw the selling of her town house, but her voluntary kin were left with the job of cleaning out her sock and desk drawers, dispensing with the detritus that the dead leave behind.

  It felt dirty, pawing through her closets, looking for something to take to remember her by, especially after hastening her death. But what? Her shoes had scuffs on the bottom, the inside linings of her purses were stained and torn. I’d always thought of her as well dressed, but everything in her closet looked tired. The majority of your possessions will immediately lose any value when you die, especially clothing and shoes. Maybe that’s what she meant by Learn from my life. Would anyone want this after my death? is a question I ask myself every time I go shopping now, and it regularly saves me from buying stuff I don’t need. I took home the books that I’d authored and had inscribed to her, along with her collection of inscribed books from other writers. I couldn’t bear to think of them ending up in an anonymous thrift store, though it’s likely her books, along with the contents of my bookshelves, will end up there one day in the hopefully distant future. If the future is completely paperless, my books, which now include Robin’s copy of Live from NewYork: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live in which her name is spelled incorrectly, will spend eternity decomposing in the Puente Hills landfill just outside of Los Angeles County. I left with a few choice bottles of wine in tow.

  Witnessing the passing of our friends, our pets, and our heroes is increasing in regularity and is giving rise to all manner of negotiations. Especially regarding our own demise.

  I met up with my single friend Lauren for lunch and when I inquired how she was doing, she blurted out, “I don’t want my cats to eat me. I really need to get married.”

  “If there’s ever a stretch of time when I haven’t heard from you for more than two days, I’ll stop in and make sure you’re still alive,” I promised her.

  “When we can’t wipe our asses, or if we forget who we are, let’s make a pact, we’ll jump off a cruise ship together,” Gia, my attorney, who is the same age as me and a fan of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, suggested in an email.

  “We’ll have to make certain we’re really far out to sea. If we’re too close to port, we might hit the bottom and break a leg.”

  “Yes, that would be even worse, a broken leg on top of everything else.”

  “Right. And, Gia, if I kick the bucket before you, take my suede Stuart Weitzman boots. I just had them reheeled.”

  After a few weeks of watching me suffer, my husband, Jeff, said, “You did the right thing, but I don’t think I want to be left alone with you if I’m ever really sick.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “Come on, let’s toast to Robin. She’d love that,” he said. We opened a Benton-Lane 2008 from Robin’s collection. Jeff was the first to take a sip.

  “It’s undrinkable—it’s turned.”

  We opened a Château de Claribès Sauvignon Blanc 2009. Same thing.

  The Russian River Pinot Noir had cork rot, so we couldn’t drink that one, either. Thank God she never knew. It would have killed her.

  MARAUDING THROUGH THE MIDDLE AGES

  Dear God,

  Please keep my head from catching on fire.

  Comparing where you were in your career at thirty to where you are in your career at fifty is not advisable in any profession, but it’s especially a bad idea when it’s midnight and you’re emailing pictures to a Hollywood casting director to prove that you can easily pass for a middle-aged woman from the Middle Ages. In the middle of the night. A trifecta of middle. “I was born to crone,” I write in the subject line, adding three exclamation points to demonstrate my unbridled enthusiasm. I wash every trace of makeup off my face, turn on a bright overhead light and start taking pictures.

  Earlier in the week I attended a DirecTV commercial casting call to play a “real to slightly character-looking, approachable, believable mother.” I’ve got this one in the bag, I reasoned. “Real to slightly character” should mean “could be Jewish.” I have given birth, and if my hormone cocktail is calibrated just right I am capable of appearing approachable enough that I won’t bite anyone’s head off for limited increments of time, especially if someone is paying me. Plus, I know there are probably only several thousand women in Los Angeles that fit this bill and out of those several thousand there are only several hundred who haven’t married into fuck-you money, or gotten their real estate license and dropped out of show business. Figuring in the ones who aren’t picking up or dropping off their kids, felled by the flu or recovering from plastic surgery, I anticipate there will probably be only a hundred women who will be able to go in on the call.

  I’m pleased to have been called in to play a mother, as this is a category that I am quickly aging out of. At this age, many auditions are for pharmaceuticals. This can lead to strange exchanges with your agents, who need to ascertain if you, in fact, have the disease being treated, which is sometimes a legal requirement.*

  “Damn it. I don’t have mesothelioma. Is the commercial for cable and Internet use, too?”

  “And print ads.”

  “Is it something I could contract before Thursday?”

  My actress friends and I were both thrilled and horrified to find ourselves auditioning for a product that treats menopausal dry vagina. “Let’s ask them to pay us in a lifetime supply,” we laughed, and then some tears were shed. “Are we there yet?” Yes, we are.

  I decide to make an effort. “Making an effort” is one of the punishments of age. In my twenties I went to auditions in my pajamas. My blasé appearance was a rebellious declaration of nonconformity. If I did that at fifty, people would assume I’d suffered a break with reality and I’d be escorted off the premises by security guards.*

  I carefully choose a cheerful red polka-dotted dress; the polka dots I hope will communicate “character,” perhaps reminiscent of Lucille Ball, and the red should add the right amount of color to my face so I can look youthful enough to fit into the “mother” category. At commercial auditions, you are expected to come dressed for the part. If the spot called for Satan, any number of casting directors would click their tongues and shake their heads in disgust if you didn’t show up with horns protruding from your forehead, a forked tongue, and a tail. If the role is for a medical professional, actors will show up in scrubs with stethoscopes casually draped around their necks, so it is unsurprising that the other women at the audition and I all appear vaguely related and similarly attired.

  “I see you made an effort” is how my hairdresser greets me when I stop for a fresh blow-dry, even though it stretches credulity that an actual mother would be freshly blow-dried, but this is TV, and all TV is aspirational. Unless it’s reality TV, and then you must appear as derelict as humanly possible or decked out like a Kardashian Barbie because reality TV is produced solely as an excuse for viewers to enjoy feeling superior to rednecks, pageant contestants, hoarders and housewives with hair extensions.

  The majority of these individuals fall into a category I think of as “celebrilites.” These media-created personalities have typically accomplished little worthy of celebration, other than keeping themselves perpetually in the public eye, if that can be considered an achievement. They occupy a claustrophobic subset of society, socializing with solely each other, cross-promoting each other’s clothing lines and cookbooks. In the same way that high levels of lead in pottery have been linked to the decline of the Roman Empire, I would venture to say that our exhaustive fascination with celebrilites heralds the decline of Western civilization more than even the popularity of Funyuns.* A small accomplishment I celebrate is
that in my forty-nine years I have yet to invite cameras to document me splashing white wine on the masklike face of a celebrilite in a cookie-cutter McMansion.

  Two days later I hear I have gotten a callback for the DirecTV spot. This one is mine, I’m confident. All I have to do is stand in a kitchen and rub my nose. I’ve stood in kitchens. I’ve rubbed my nose. Many times. I expect to rub it again in the future, so why not with a camera rolling? At the callback, a group of thirty actresses in my category are corralled into a holding area. At least three of us are wearing identical red polka-dotted dresses. We are informed that the director and ad agency executives will be in the room. We are to speak our names into the camera. The director will then point to us and either say yes or no, and if it’s no, we are instructed to leave the room. If yes, we will be granted the privilege of rubbing our noses.

  There are more actors than chairs, it’s stiflingly hot and we wait for over an hour before they start the weeding-out process. Some are pacing anxiously, nervously reapplying makeup or rehearsing. I seize the opportunity to catch up with acting buddies. I have just enough time to find out what sports my friends’ kids are playing to keep my spirits from flagging. Too much introspection at such moments can be a dangerous thing.

  Projecting into the future must be avoided at all costs. I’ve caught myself adding the words “for the rest of my life” to the end of sentences—a twist on the Chinese fortune cookie game, the one where you add “in bed” to every fortune you get? You will enjoy unparalleled success . . . “in bed.” You will make new friends . . . “in bed.” That pillow-crease wrinkle on my face that used to disappear an hour after waking will remain there . . . “for the rest of my life.” One bad landing on the tennis court and I could wind up in the boot . . . “for the rest of my life.” A job interview where I can be disqualified after merely uttering my name is the best I can expect . . . “for the rest of my life.” Even if it’s true, I’ve had to institute a zero-tolerance enforcement policy.