Life Is Not a Stage (25 page)

I came to visit her at the hospital almost every day. “Goddamn phantom pains,” she cried out and grabbed on to the bar above her bed. I asked her some questions about the pain, when it came on, how long it lasted, etc. I thought her description was similar to the contractions when you are about to give birth, so I had an idea.

“I’m going to teach you some breathing techniques, so you’ll know how to use them when it starts up.” I showed her the breathing patterns from natural childbirth. She tried it a few times, and it started to work.

“Oh, you little cunt,” she said, using her favorite term of endearment. “Here they give me all this medication and all this physical therapy, and you come in here and teach me a few breaths and I’m cured!”

Totie fought back and learned how to walk with an artificial leg. Even that became a joke with her. She had several different fashion looks on the legs that she used—one had Gucci designs all over it, another was black. A group of us flew up for her first appearance in Las Vegas after her recovery. She walked out on that stage and showed incredible courage coming back and poking fun at herself and her infirmities. She inspired us in the way she persevered despite the devastating effects of diabetes. Her father had the same disease and died at age forty-nine. Her beloved sister also died at the same age from brain cancer.

“I’ll never make it past forty-nine,” she told me.

“Totie, stop saying that,” I warned her, lecturing to her about the power of the mind.

She fulfilled her own prophecy. It was a great loss.

Elsie Giorgi’s passing also had a profound impact on my spirit. She had been a great support to me throughout the years, always there to help when something came up. As she got older, it was my turn to take a more active role in taking care of her. But she could be a stubborn patient. After she broke a hip, she started slowing down. Like many transplanted New Yorkers, she loved the freedom of driving in Southern California. She had personalized license plates made up for each new car, the first one with her initials, EAG, followed by the number 1, EAG2 for the second one, and so on.

“Elsie, I told you I’d always tell you the truth,” I told her. “You can’t drive anymore.” I took away the keys to EAG9.

“Noooo!” But after she yelled at me, she quickly acquiesced. Not long afterward she had a stroke and lost the ability to speak, and for someone who loved to talk as much as she did, it was heartbreaking. I had been on the road in Nashville and just returned home when I got the call that she had taken a turn for the worse. I raced to Cedars-Sinai hospital. When I came into the room, a nurse told me that she had just taken her last breath.

“No, she hasn’t gone yet,” I cried, rushing to her room. She was lying there, and I just picked her up and held her and talked to her. As I was talking to her, her cold body suddenly got hotter and hotter. I looked at her, and one tear rolled down her cheek. It was a very profound experience for me. I removed the jade ring she always wore and gave it to one of the nurses who had cared for her during her illness.

I was in charge of her funeral arrangements. Elsie always wore two dresses that were exactly the same in style, one royal blue and the other shocking pink. Her trademark was this dirty old raincoat. She laughed when we called her Dr. Columbo because she was just as disheveled in appearance as Peter Falk’s famous television character. I had her dress and the raincoat cleaned, and people smiled as they viewed her, saying, “That’s Elsie.” Her ashes were flown back to New York for burial in a jade urn I picked out with a little gold plaque labeled “EAG10” to take her to heaven.

Gaining a better understanding of the nature of love and death was part of the process preparing me for the next big threshold. It is ever fascinating how the universe responds by giving you the tools you need and quickens that process once your heart is truly in a place of trust. To take the leap into both dimensions, it requires a revolution within oneself. Thanks to hypnotherapy and the changes brought about by my life with John, I finally got the upper hand on that lifetime-long resistance, and it brought me to a place of readiness. For the first time, I saw what happens when we finally rise above the fear of going into these places and do so without hesitation or uncertainty. I think it is when the most rewarding transformation begins to unfold.

CHAPTER 21

The Dragonflies

W
e’ll be walking together in San Francisco when you’re ninety,” John once told me. That would have made him ninety-nine years old, since he was nine years older than I was. John was my best friend and my lover, but in retrospect he was also a father and mother to me. Every day was an adventure even in the simplest and most mundane acts of spontaneity. “Are you free for lunch? I’ll meet you at so-and-so.” There was never a dull moment, especially when we were out on the boat. He’d always try to get me to do new things, such as guiding the boat out of the dock. It was no problem to back it out. Bringing it back in was another matter. I never mustered the courage. That slip looked awfully small, and the “boat” was almost ninety feet long. But I did learn to drive it and handle it during anchoring.

When bigger career issues came up, he also challenged me to expand my thinking and go beyond self-limiting assumptions. For example, I was offered a cohosting job on
Later Today
, an hourlong morning program added on to
The Today Show
. I wanted to turn it down, only because I didn’t see any way I could ask John to live in New York. We had such a great life in California, and John was still seeing clients, although he was semiretired. After his first heart attack and first bypass surgery before we had met, he stopped working fifteen-hour days, but didn’t completely give it up. He got so many calls and letters from all the people he had helped: “You saved my life.” “You got me off drugs.” “You saw me when I didn’t have the money to pay you.” So he went back on a limited basis, but carved out the time to be with me as much as possible. All the same, it was hard to ask him to make such a sacrifice, and I wasn’t sure I really wanted to do it.

“I think you should do it,” he urged me. He had good answers for every “but what about…” I offered. It was also hard to argue when he told me that it was a golden opportunity to make his big dream come true: the chance to take our boat through the Panama Canal. That journey would be the longest time we would ever be apart. He parked the boat down in Florida, where we would go on weekends.

Every time he had a health setback, John would fight his way out of it. A second bypass surgery was followed quickly by the death of his beloved younger brother, which crushed him. It was the only time I ever saw him cry. This was heavy on him, but he bounced back again. A short time after, following a bout with pneumonia, he had a CAT scan at Cedars-Sinai. He had been coughing, but the lungs were clear, they told him. A couple of little nodules, but nothing to worry about, they advised.

About two or three months later, he wasn’t feeling well and was exhausted. He was also starting to walk funny, a strange kind of shuffling that made it harder for him to get up and down the dock. That difficulty, along with the telltale frozen stare from his beautiful sea-blue eyes were symptoms of his soon-to-be-diagnosed Parkinson’s disease. But worse news was in store. His cardiologist Dr. Gerald Bresnahan and heart surgeon Dr. James MacPherson at Centinela Hospital took some contrast X-rays that revealed that those lung nodules had suddenly grown in three short months into two large cancerous tumors. They were the worst kind, small cell and oat cell.

We went to the City of Hope and saw Dr. James Doroshow, a renowned cancer specialist who is now with the National Institutes of Health. “We’ll treat it,” he told us. “There are some options.” John swallowed hard as he heard the devastating diagnosis.

It was undeniable that the cancer and the Parkinson’s were exacting a harsh toll on him. The body’s various systems work in such remarkable synchronicity in both healthy and diseased states. For example, in the beginning, he was going crazy having to urinate all the time. It was curious to learn how this was caused by the growing tumor drawing all the sodium out of his system. As his situation worsened, his ability to speak weakened, which was especially frustrating for a brilliant teacher. A lovely nurse named Margie Elifano bought him a little chalkboard, but his writing grew progressively smaller and smaller until we could hardly read it at all.

During one chemotherapy session, John got so distraught that he tried to get out of the bed, ripping the tubes out and shouting that he had to get out of there. Dr. Doroshow and the staff came in and were wonderful with him. After another chemo session, he told me that he wanted to go to Vito’s in Santa Monica, his favorite restaurant. Despite being in very fragile shape, he was feeling good from the effects of a strong dose of cortisone. But I was worried about taking him there, not the least because of his difficulty swallowing and the high risk for choking.

“It’s a little early,” I told him as we pulled up outside the restaurant. “You wait here and I’ll go in and see.” The restaurant wasn’t open yet, and all the waiters, kitchen staff, and busboys were sitting at the tables relaxing and playing cards. I explained the situation. Immediately they jumped to their feet and put on their jackets. I got John and we came in a few moments later, and the same ritual played itself out just as it had innumerable times before. Hank the waiter read the specials knowing full well that John was going to order his favorite veal and pasta dish as always. The way they treated him that afternoon is a reason why I love that place to this day. He was choking all through the meal, but it was so important to him.

His hairpiece also figured as a significant symbol of his fighting courage and his hope that something might bring him back. He was worried about his appearance while in the hospital. I love bald men, so it was never an issue for me, but I promised him that his hair would stay in good shape. A stylist came to the City of Hope from the manufacturer and washed his hair and put on a new piece. As sick as he was, it made him feel so good, and I managed to keep that hairpiece on until he died.

“I think you should learn how to hypnotize me,” John said to me one day. I was a nervous wreck just at the thought. He had never let anyone hypnotize him
ever
, and even though I had become a certified hypnotherapist, here I was the apprentice suddenly given this sacred responsibility by the master. He knew how beneficial it could be for someone in his situation. If you are a hypnotherapist, you have to have a totally different induction than what you use for your patients, otherwise the therapist would also fall into hypnosis while giving it. So he had me write it all out, along with the specific suggestions that he wanted. It was different than anything I had ever done as a trained therapist myself. Nervously, I tried it the first time on him. He told me that it wasn’t bad and there was some hope for me. The second time, it went a little better. And after the third time, he gave me an enthusiastic thumbs-up.

Annette Fields, the patient advocate, took me aside to have “the conversation.”

“You have to prepare. We always ask these questions if, God forbid, the treatments don’t work, we have to have some arrangements. You’re going to have to ask John how he wants to handle it.” It’s the conversation you never want to have.

“Oh, John, by the way, do you want to be cremated or…?”

“Cremated,” he answered back calmly. He was fine with that. That same day, I called Westwood Mortuary and spoke to a very nice man to finalize the plans.

There was a whole practical side of dying of which I had suddenly become hyperaware. There were a few patients I had visited on the floor who passed away during this period. But you never saw them remove the bodies from the room with a sheet over them. I asked Dr. Doroshow about this.

“Is there some kind of hidden compartment underneath, a special gurney?”

“You’re pretty smart,” he answered. “It’s a precaution because they don’t want the other patients to become disturbed by it.”

It is hard to describe how difficult it was going back into John’s room later that day after planning for his cremation and trying to forget about the whole thing. Throughout the whole ordeal, I never allowed myself to get emotional in front of him. Once I stepped outside, it was another matter, and I allowed my emotions to run freely. But I got his strength. I stepped up. Because of John, I met every challenge.

John never talked about the fact that he was dying. He still stayed hopeful that the doctors would find an answer. He thought that perhaps he might be able to get some radiation treatments. When Dr. Doroshow came in, John asked him about it. “John, you’re not a candidate for that, but we’ll keep working,” Dr. Doroshow said.

Later that same evening, John looked at me and said, “Well, shall we call it a day?”

“Yes, I think we should,” I told him.

Per his instructions, I hypnotized him one last time that evening. But in contrast to the other times, I did not count him out to bring him back to waking consciousness, but left him to remain in the hypnotic state for what would be the last two days of his life.

For obvious reasons, I didn’t want to leave the hospital, so they arranged a bed first down the hall and later in his room. I desperately wanted to be with him when he was making his transition.

“You don’t know when someone is actually going to leave,” Dr. Doroshow warned me. “You could be in the bathroom or down the hall visiting other patients. I think he’s already there but he keeps coming back and forth. You can’t count on being there.”

“No, I have to,” I told him.

His son, George, and I sat by his bedside.

“That was his last breath,” he told me.

“No it wasn’t,” I assured him. My hand was on John’s chest. Right away, I felt one more flutter of his heart and one more breath, and that was it. I know that what I witnessed in the next few seconds was not my imagination but an actual manifestation. The energy started at his feet and came up, up, up and then went out the top of his head. I saw him release and go, the metaphysical and transcendent act of his spirit leaving his body. And just like that, he went into total repose. It was September 26, 2002.

At the memorial, his son spoke and told of his father’s great accomplishments in his field as a maverick who broke new ground and created all these new modalities. “But he didn’t find true love until he was in his fifties,” he revealed of his father’s personal side. “It changed him in a very profound way.” Those words broke through the veil of sadness and made me very happy.

A man who was the son of the owner of the mortuary came on a motorcycle to the marina to deliver a velvet satchel containing John’s ashes. It was all so surreal. We took the boat out to his favorite spot on the back side of Catalina and scattered his ashes there, although I decided to keep a small amount, which I keep in our home. It makes me feel very safe.

The experience of having to deal with all the arrangements for John in my grief-stricken state made me think about sparing my children the same when my time comes. By myself and without telling anyone, I went to Westwood Memorial Park and purchased two spaces for my ashes next to the plaques I had put in a special garden honoring John and Elsie. Westwood is, after all, a famous cemetery for people in show business, so it made sense on that level, too.

Of course, after I made my purchase, the salesperson wanted to offer me a number of additional services. “We can come by and pick you up,” the person said. By “you,” he meant “the body.” At that point in the conversation, I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t ready to “go there,” in more ways than one. The consideration for my children stopped right there in its tracks. “No,” I thought. “They can deal with that!”

Going back to the empty house after John’s ceremony was tough. Barbara stayed with me for the first few nights, but then I told her that I would be fine staying on my own. You just can’t sit in a chair weeping. I didn’t fold my tent. I heard his voice: “Come on! Keep moving forward.” He believed that when we kept in motion we kept evolving. Things would keep unfolding. So that’s what I tried to do. But it was still very hard for me.

I canceled so many dates during the time of John’s illness. I decided to go back to work, but that proved no easy task. There were certain songs that were a struggle to get through. For the nearly twenty years we were together, John had been such an integral part of that artistic expression. “How will I ever do this? I can’t do this!” But you just have to suck it up and work through the emotion and try again. There was an audience out there that I didn’t want to disappoint. “You can do it,” I heard John’s voice encouraging me.

I thought about myself as a little girl who persevered in the most vulnerable of circumstances. Nobody could really kill my joy, my optimism, or my smile. I honestly think that you come in with that spirit, and it is your task to keep it alive and not have it get extinguished. And now it was almost paradoxical how my life had completed a full circle. I had once been that frightened but driven young woman who was secretly relieved to be absent for my father’s death and funeral. Now I had been a mature woman who stood present and resolute for the soul mate I loved and watched him go.

But the grieving process is not that simple. There were layers of anger and fear still present like scar tissue. One morning, I sat at the breakfast table where John and I always sat, looking out the window. I was sobbing. Before John died, a disgruntled former student embroiled both the Hypnosis Motivation Institute and him in a lawsuit. We learned that the situation with this student was hardly an accident, but something that had happened all too frequently in this person’s past. In all the decades of being a therapist and a teacher, John had never been exposed to such nonsense. And because I was also affiliated with the school, I got dragged into it, which upset John to no end in his weakened state. It was a nightmare. It was very costly. And I had inherited it. Added on top of that was the financial stress since I now had to shoulder alone the responsibility of owning a big boat and a big house.