Aileen Getty was living there at the time and she claimed to be dying of AIDS. Bow the dog had gone blind, and he looked like he was dying. The only person who really looked alive that day was Cynthia. At one point, we were sitting out in the garden together and a black cat that Barbara had left behind came out of the foliage. Cynthia jumped up and screamed.
I said, “Why did you do that?” And she said, “There’s something about that cat.” I said, “Surely, you’re not superstitious?” And she said, “I’m superstitious about that cat. That cat means no good.”
Later that afternoon, Cynthia went into Tim’s office. He looked truly moribund, and so she put her hands on his head and started to stroke his temples, and it was as if a strange transfer of life took place between them. I really don’t know how else to describe it.
The huge 1994 Northridge earthquake had significantly rearranged the traffic infrastructure between Beverly Hills and Pasadena. As a result, we had to wade through three and a half hours of traffic to get to the Rose Bowl. By the time we got there, the will call window was closed. Tim and Aileen decided they didn’t want to deal with it and left.
However, while Cynthia and I were sitting together in our car for three and a half hours along with ninety thousand other concertgoers, we got to talking about the future, something we had agreed not to think about. We felt the best way to create a good future was to maintain a well-wrought present. Up to that point, Cynthia had been adamantly opposed to having children, but she suddenly said, “I think you and I should have children. And if we’re going to do that, I would love to start soon so we should be married. How do you feel about that?”
Even though I was not yet divorced from Elaine, I said, “That’s all right.” On some profound level, it seemed that we had been married ever since we had met.
We used the rest of our time in the car to plot out the next couple of years. We would move to San Francisco in September and buy a house. She would set up her new practice there over the winter. We would get married in the spring and then start having babies shortly thereafter.
Our passage into the concert was no easy deal. We had to buy scalper’s tickets at a prodigious price, and the seating left a lot to be desired. But nevertheless, Cynthia danced like a dust devil. It was a moment of unadulterated delight.
Once the show was over we had to find our car, which we had parked on a golf course next to the Rose Bowl. Because it was ad hoc parking, there were no markings for area identification and we trudged around the golf course for two hours looking for our car.
Cynthia started to feel the effects of the flu taking hold again. She said, “I feel like I want to crawl out of my own skin.” And I said, “Don’t do that, darling. Your skin wouldn’t look anything like it should without you in it.” By the time we got back to Daryl’s house, Cynthia was completely exhausted, but she still went running on the beach in Santa Monica the next morning.
Cynthia was going to be thirty years old in two days, and we’d planned a big splashy birthday party for her in New York. We were going to fly back together Sunday afternoon, but I got a phone call from Irwin Winkler, who was producing a movie called The Net. It was to be the first popular-culture representation of the Internet, and I wanted every opportunity to put the right spin on the ball.
So I agreed to meet with him that day in Los Angeles, which meant I would have to take the red-eye back to New York that night rather than flying with Cynthia. She wanted to delay her flight to accompany me, but I said, “Look, you’ve been sick and you’ve got patients to see tomorrow. Why don’t you just take the afternoon flight? And then I’ll be home to see you in time for us to make love before you go off to work in the morning.”
Those were the days when you could still walk with someone right to the gate at LAX. When we said goodbye to each other there, we enjoyed one of our customarily shameless kisses and she said, “We were made for each other, baby. Nothing can keep us apart.” Then she bounded down the Jetway as full of life as anyone I’d ever seen.
After getting on the plane, she took a nap. When the flight attendant tried to wake Cynthia up to tell her to put on her seat belt as they came into JFK, she was dead. The one thing that could have proved her last words false had happened.
I later learned that she had an underlying genetic predisposition that allowed that virus to unweave her heart muscle. When you get the flu, you ache, because a virus is literally disassembling your DNA. It was viral cardiomyopathy. Had it been bacterial, they could have done something about it, but at that stage of the game, probably the only thing that would have saved her would have been an immediate heart transplant.
When I arrived home in the cold gray dawn, Cynthia was not there. There was plenty of evidence indicating her chaotic departure but none that she had returned. I started to call a few friends to see if they had heard anything, and there was a fellow intern from Beth Israel who said that she had received a mysterious phone call at home in the middle of the night from the Jamaica Hospital Medical Center in Queens asking if she knew Cynthia.
She said she did, but they wouldn’t tell her what was up. So I immediately called the emergency room there and was told that yes, Cynthia Horner had been there but that she had been moved to Queens General Hospital. I then battled though an incredibly convoluted phone tangle asking if anybody had heard of this case. All the time I was on hold during these phone transfers, Muzak was playing Pachelbel’s Canon in D, which set a certain tone.
Finally, I got somebody who said she knew about Cynthia. She then put the phone down and I heard her call out to someone else in the room, “What time did she expire?” And my world went flying. I told her there had to be a mistake, because there was no conceivable way that the woman I was looking for had expired. But no, they had positive ID on her and all that remained was for me to come down and identify the body in the morgue.
I called a mobster patient that Cynthia had, and he drove me out there. As it turned out, her skin didn’t look so bad without her in it. But I felt like my own heart had been amputated. I felt like Moses might have if he had been given a year in the Promised Land before being kicked back out into the desert. There is really no way to say this without sounding incredibly sappy, but we were the same soul.
In terms of telling her family about us, Cynthia had been very secretive, which was kind of ironic given the way I felt about secrecy on the Internet. But none of them knew about the two of us. Shortly before she died, Cynthia had gone home for Easter and told her father about what had happened with her and Diego, but no one else in the family knew a thing.
After I determined that it really was Cynthia’s body in the morgue, it was incumbent upon me to call her parents. I woke up her mother and said, “You don’t know me and you’re going to wish you didn’t,” and then I told her what had happened. Fortunately, her parents were extraordinarily graceful. Her father said that he had never seen her as happy as she had been during the year we had been together. He’d had no idea what to make of it but now understood, and so he exonerated me.
Cynthia’s service was held on Friday, April 22, 1994, in a small church in Nanaimo. About 250 people came; she was a real star as far as they were concerned. Nobody knew who I was, but I delivered the only eulogy. I still don’t know why the family let me do it.
I began by saying, “I don’t know most of you, and I envy the many among you who were graced with Cynthia all her short life. I only knew her a little while. We spent this last glorious year together. It was the best year of my life and, I firmly believe, it was the best year of her life, too….
“I don’t know that I believe in the supernatural, but I do believe in miracles and our time together was filled with the events of magical unlikelihood. I also believe that angels, or something like them, sometimes live among us, hidden within our fellow human beings. I’m convinced that such an angel dwelled in Cynthia. I felt this presence ofte
n in Cynthia’s lightness of being, in her decency, her tolerance, her incredible love. I never heard Cynthia speak ill of anyone, nor did I ever hear anyone speak ill of her. She gave joy and solace to all who met her.
“I feel her angel still, dancing around the spiritual periphery, just beyond the sight of my eyes, narrowed as they are with tears and the glare of ordinary light. Her graceful goodness continues to surround me, if less focused and tangible than before.
“With a care both conscious and reverential, Cynthia and I built a love which I believe inspired most who came near it….We wanted to make our union into a message of hope, and I believe we did, even though we knew that hearts opened so freely can be shattered if something should go wrong. As my heart is shattered now.
“So among the waves of tragedy which have crashed on me with her death is a terror that our message of hope has been changed into a dreadful warning. But I must tell you that had I known in the beginning that I would be here today doing this terrible thing, I would still have loved her as unhesitatingly, because true love is worth any price one is asked to pay.
“The other message we wished to convey was one of faith in the essential goodness and purpose of life. I have always felt that no matter how inscrutable its ways and means, the universe is working perfectly and working according to a greater plan than we can know.
“In the last few days, I have had to battle with the fear that everything is actually just random, that the universe is a howling void of meaningless chaos, indifferent to everything that I value. All hope has at times seemed unjustified to me.
“But groundless hope, like unconditional love, is the only kind worth having. Its true name is faith. As it is a shallow faith which goes untested, so it is that if we can keep our faith through this terrible test, we will emerge with a conviction of enduring strength. And this faith will become Cynthia’s greatest gift to us. If we can build with our lives a monument to her light, her gameness, and her love, she will not have died in vain, and her death will become as much a miracle as was her life.”
What I said had a big effect on a lot of people. One of the things I discovered, even though I had known this before in some abstract way but hadn’t ever really focused on it, was how completely fucked up America is in regard to death and mourning. You don’t die in America without losing. You lost your battle with death. And so it’s considered to be an act of weakness, which makes it difficult to accept the second most common thing in life.
When my mother was ninety-four years old and had cancer for the third time, she had Mormon relatives coming into her hospital room in Salt Lake City saying, “You can beat this thing, Mim. You’re a fighter.” Such horseshit. As a consequence, people don’t feel they have permission to mourn. Stiff upper lip and they go on. That was not an option for me. I had been hit so hard I had to mourn, and I was doing it completely involuntarily. I had no choice at all.
Even though it was still in the early days of the Internet, what I had written about Cynthia, including my eulogy for her, went viral. My God, I got probably five megabytes of emails from all over the world, most of them saying that they now felt like they had been given permission to mourn and were grateful to me for that. Some of these even came from people who had lost someone years before, and finally understood how they could now feel as bad as they still did. Although this was comforting for me to know, it did nothing to alleviate my grief.
After Cynthia died, I was forced to decide whether the universe was senseless and cruel or actually had a purpose. And I realized the physical world exists so that love can make sense, because without the frame of fear and doubt and suffering, love is effortless and meaningless. I believed that we volunteer our souls to come into the physical world so that we can do battle with fear.
Nonetheless, the pain got so bad for a while that if I stopped moving, I couldn’t stand it. And so I fell into a lifestyle of continuous motion. Over the course of the following year, I flew more than 270,000 miles on just one airline. The stratosphere became my church. Whenever I was up there, I felt like I was closer to her.
During this period, I would suddenly—and surprisingly, even to myself—break into a conflagration of weeping. You could spontaneously combust and cause less consternation than if you’re a full-grown man who suddenly bursts into tears while sitting next to some guy in business class on a plane. Knowing I could cry there whenever the urge hit me, I decided to go into rehab.
THIRTY-EIGHT
REHAB
When I went into rehab, I was smoking three packs of Marlboro Lights 100s a day. I was twenty pounds overweight and sleeping three hours a night and had pretty much succeeded in creating jet lag as a poetic art form. I had also started drinking again, which was worrisome because I hadn’t been drinking at all during the time I was with Cynthia, but it didn’t seem to me like my drinking was really out of control.
I realized I needed to be someplace where I could cry as much as I was compelled to do without freaking out everybody around me. About two weeks after Cynthia died, I went into rehab at St. Helena Hospital in Napa. I chose it because Weir had checked himself in there a couple of days before. In addition, they had offered Cynthia a job once. The second I announced my intention to go there, Weir announced his intention to leave, which I didn’t think was a coincidence but I also understood it because of how well I knew Weir.
I stayed at St. Helena for about three weeks. It was a traditional twelve-step program, and I went to a lot of meetings. I was in a group one day when a woman started talking about the reason she had come there. It was because her kitten had died and it had totally unhinged her and she had gone off on a bender. She started to cry. Somebody else started talking about how he had lost his dog and that was the worst thing that had ever happened to him. There was also a really rough longshoreman—whom I had not seen shed a tear the whole time I had been there—and he started talking about a pet duck he’d had that had been killed by dogs, and he started to cry like a baby.
I was sitting there thinking, This guy is crying about a duck? What about me, guys? I’ve had a little bit of a loss here myself. I started to say something about it and then I suddenly realized that what they were all mourning was the only form of unconditional love they had ever been willing to accept. The closest they had ever gotten to it was from a pet, because they could not accept it from a human being, which is something that most people cannot do. And so I had to count myself as having been incredibly lucky to have experienced it with another human being.
THIRTY-NINE
A GOLD RUSH OF THE HEART
Upon my release from rehab in St. Helena, I had conquered my involuntary weeping, but I was still unenthusiastic about being alive. I knew I had to stay alive because of my daughters, but the important thing was to want to be alive. In the service of that, I decided to proceed with the plan Cynthia and I had made earlier.
We had decided that upon my return from Sarajevo, we would take a long tour of the north country with my daughters. We were going to attend a Horner family reunion in Alberta and then embark on the Inside Passage by riding the ferries of the Alaska Marine Highway System so we could follow the Chilkoot Trail to the north slope of Alaska. I decided, and Elaine was incredibly brave in allowing me to do this, that I would now take that trip myself with Leah, Anna, and Amelia, who were then twelve, ten, and eight years old.
I went to Pinedale and threw them all into the back of the family Suburban and headed north. We had so many adventures on that trip that it probably merits a book of its own. We experienced such beauty, such peril, and such crushing boredom that by the time we started south from Fairbanks, I wanted to be alive. I did not have to be alive. I wanted to be alive because of my daughters, the Barlow-ettes.
The four of us had so many conversations, many of which are still under way, as we bumped across hundreds of miles of scrawny pine tundra. After a while, they even quit asking, “Are we
there yet?” Because there was no there there.
Moreover, I made several extraordinary realizations about child-rearing. One of them was based on a phrase I’d once heard that was attributed to Dr. Benjamin Spock: “All children are lawyers.” It certainly became clear to me that much of the trouble erupting from the rear of the Suburban was actually an attempt to litigate. What my daughters wanted was rendered judgment from me, the Supreme Court. Like the Supreme Court, I realized I did not have to hear the case. I could simply refuse to hear it. For several days, they thought this was unimaginably cruel, but then the level of attempted litigation decreased dramatically.
The other thing I discovered was the art of cooperating with the enemy. In this case, the enemy was whining. After we had traversed several hundred miles of scrawny pine tundra, I could hear the subtones of a whine developing among them. And so I would stop the car and say, “Okay. It is time for a five-minute whine. Everybody out. All of you get out of the car.”
We would then all whine about how ugly the countryside was and how long the trip was taking and how stupid we all were to have ever done this in the first place. We rarely needed the whole five minutes. We came back down the Inside Passage as a different familial unit than we’d been going up it.
We stopped at Cynthia’s parents’ house in Nanaimo and formed such a bond with her mother and father that they said if anything ever happened to Elaine and me, they would be happy to raise the Barlow-ettes.
After taking my daughters back to Pinedale in time for school, I then resumed my life on the road, flying and speaking and speaking and flying.
FORTY
HE’S GONE
In 1984, I had gone to the house on Hepburn Heights Road in San Rafael where Jerry Garcia was living with Rock Scully, who by that point was no longer managing the Dead. They were both using heroin, and although few of us ever visited what was obviously a no-fly zone, I have always been a willful fool on behalf of hesitant angels. So I decided to go up there to see what was going on and spend the afternoon with Garcia, who, as I had expected, was in terrible shape.
Mother American Night Page 19