The Beauty of Living Twice

Death Becomes Me

I opened my eyes, and there he was standing over me, just inches from my face. A stranger looking at me with so much kindness that I was sure I was going to die. He was stroking my head, my hair; God, he was handsome. I wished he were someone who loved me instead of someone whose next words were You’re bleeding into your brain.

He stood there gently touching my head and I just lay there knowing that no one in the room loved me. Knowing it in my guts—not needing my bleeding brain to be aware of the ridiculous slap-down of my now-immobilized life. It was late September 2001. I was in the ER at the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. I asked Dr. Handsome, Will I lose my ability to speak? He said it’s possible. I wanted a phone. I needed to call my mom and my sister. They needed to hear this from me while I could still tell them myself. The doctor squeezed my hand in his. I realized he was doing his darndest to fill in with that special kind of love that comes when someone pursues the vocation that they were meant to, if only for moments like this. I learned a lot from him.

I called my sister, Kelly, first. She was as she always is: the most magnificent person I know. She is kinder to others than she is to herself, naïve in her gentleness. Then I called my mom, a more difficult conversation for me, since I didn’t know if she liked me very much. Here I was, dying and insecure all at the same time. She was gardening outside in her yard on top of a mountain in Pennsylvania. She fell apart.

It’s important to consider that Dot falls apart over radio commercials, so I waited, because, well, I knew she would pull it together. Despite the distance between us, she and my dad arrived in under twenty-four hours. She ran into the hospital still in her shorts, covered in gardening mud, dirt under her nails and fear on her face. Years of uncertainty and miscommunication between us fell away in a look. As I lay there knowing that I could die at any second, she stroked my face with her dusty hand and I suddenly felt that my mother loved me. Bit by bit.

My father stood beside her like a bull looking to charge.

I called my best friend of more than twenty years, Mimi, and said what we always said when the news was exceptionally good or bad: You’d better sit down. I could hear her sharp inhale. I said, I might die and you are the only one I can tell the truth to because somebody needs to take care of everyone and it’s not going to be me. I’m bleeding into my brain. They don’t know why.

She said, Oh, shit.

I said, There is a very good-looking doctor here, and sadly I might not be able to flirt with him.

She was trying not to cry as she whispered, Oh, honey, I’m on the next plane. As I knew she would be.

Then came the silence again. Echoing off the emergency room tiles and hitting my newly broken heart. I remember feeling something between scared and fascinated that no one was running around yelling, STAT STAT! like they do on TV. There was a stunning lack of urgency and movement. The doctor—yeah, that one—told me an ambulance was coming to transport me to another hospital, Moffitt-Long, which was renowned for neurological issues, and that they would take special care of me.

God, that really made me feel bad. There are just times when getting special care can be such a downer. This is not like floor seats at a Laker game or getting the table by the window at your favorite restaurant. Privileges. Fame. Shit.

It was then that I suddenly felt everything moving strangely, as if the film of my life were moving through a camera backward. Fast. I started to experience a feeling of falling, and then as though something were overtaking me, body and soul, followed by this tremendous, luminous, uplifting whiteout pulling me right out of my body and into a familiar brilliant other body of . . . knowing?

The light was so luminous. It was so . . . mystical. I wanted to know it. I wanted to immerse myself. Their faces were not just familiar. They were transcendent. Some of them had not been gone for long. I had cared for some of them until the end of this life. They were my closest friends, Caroline, Tony Duquette, Manuel. I had missed them so much. I felt so cold in the room I was coming from. They were so warm, so happy, so welcoming. Without their saying a word, I understood everything they were telling me about why we are safe, why we should not be afraid: because we are surrounded by love. That in fact we are love.

Suddenly I felt like I had been kicked in the middle of my chest by a mule, the impact was so harsh, and, astoundingly, I was awake and back in the emergency room. I had made a choice. I took the kind of gasp you take when you are underwater far too long. I sat up; the light was blinding. All I could see was Dr. Handsome, standing back, observing me.

I had to pee so badly, but as I turned to get off the gurney, I was so high up, like an Alice in a Wonderland of white and stainless steel.

What do you need? the doctor said.

Bathroom.

There.

I slipped far, farther down onto the cool tiles, and felt like I floated to the toilet and peed for a long time, wandering back to where the doctor lifted me up like the feather I had become.

The last few years, throughout the late nineties, I had been chasing a love I didn’t have. A love that I thought did, but didn’t, belong to me. I chased literally—leaving Hollywood and moving to Northern California—figuratively, and spiritually: always trying to be something more, something that would be the thing that would bring me closer to understanding how to be better at life, better at love and loving. I was watching my own life, and suddenly it ran out right in front of me.

Suddenly, one fine, pretty afternoon, all of my questions were more than answered. Without gauze or haze or pretense: all of those efforts failed. The facts were just that: I was not loved, not wanted; I was less than.

In my fine and decent desire to be something more than I had been before, something I thought might be more real, I had failed. I had done everything I could think of, and nothing was the correct thing, nothing the right action. I thought at that time that if I kept doing what I thought was the correct and spiritually elegant thing to do, the thing I longed for would open to me. It did not. I had simply made bad choices. Uninformed choices. Spiritually impoverished choices. I had let the core me go in order to be more. I thought I wasn’t enough. I couldn’t wife it away.

I was ignorant of the fact that I was not in the correct place for me or that I could leave, because, per usual, I wanted to be good at this. I wanted to do what I said. Even if I had made a mistake, I would carry it through, I would figure it out.

Until this time and this moment, when I had reached too far, wanted too much, I accepted what I shouldn’t have, made deals with myself in an effort to figure out why I had given up so much for so little. Because I was a woman who had made it, very few people personally valued me for what I had done, what I had made of myself. It made it so much easier to give it away. After all, what was I? An actress? A fundraiser? Did I matter? Was the assessment of me true? Was I not really worth as much as a man with the same accomplishments?

I had grown up with parents who loved each other more than they were interested in their kids. Parents who we would find necking on the sofa when we came in from playing. I grew up with parents who still danced in the yard after fifty years of marriage, as if they were alone. I was not aware that there were people who just didn’t love their spouses. I believed that even divorced people struggled with those big decisions. I was swimming in quicksand, losing all points of reference. I can tell you this: when I failed at the thing I left everything behind for—the thing I saw growing up, the real kind of love that matters—I had nothing left within to find me.

Weighed down by this new knowledge, this failure, I’d walked down the hall and into the TV room, past the sofas and toward the window, wanting to look out at the garden, where I had buried the ultrasound pictures of my miscarried children under the magnolia saplings (ones that would bloom with no scent), which seemed to be doing so well. Without warning, it was as if Zeus himself hurled a bolt of lightning directly under the back right-hand side of my head. I was airborne, flying over the back of the sofa, smashing into the coffee table, telephone, tablets, pens, papers, remotes, pillows, the sofas themselves going this way and that as my head bounced off the floor, bearing the brunt of my fall.

Haunted by memories, I lay there for what seemed a long time, time itself floating by while I was fascinated with the fibers in the rug, the lack of color in the room, and ultimately grateful for my aloneness. I think I slept there, or blacked out there.

Thankfully, there was a group of three young, local San Francisco–based Irish nannies who rotated coming in to help with my son, Roan, who I had only recently adopted, and who was very young at the time, just a wee babe. While deliriously happy to finally become a parent, already having lost three five-and-a-half-month pregnancies, I was old to be a new mom, already past forty, and sure I didn’t know much of anything at all about parenting.

During the next few days, I wandered. At some point I got into my convertible and attempted to drive myself to the hospital. I had no idea where I was, and found myself at a stop sign, my right foot totally numb, the numbness creeping up my leg, as I looked up at the trees, heard words from the radio, thought, Oh, I must have anthrax poisoning, and felt tears running down my face, as this was just two weeks after 9/11. Fortunately someone pulled up beside me and offered to help me, guiding me home and taking me into my house. Where I just sat at the dining room table, telling our nanny I had a terrible pain in my head. She told me to take some aspirin, which may have saved my life.

The next morning I started to lose body temperature. I took a down comforter into the yard and tried to feel the sun. I couldn’t get warm. I went upstairs and lay on my heated bathroom floor. The phone rang; someone stepped over me. I was holding a space outside and above my head where I thought the pain was, talking to myself while crying and moaning.

Thankfully, the speakerphone was on; it was Mimi. I tried to holler but croaked out instead, Mimi, help me.

She insisted an ambulance be called.

Instead there was a call to my gynecologist; I guess that’s what some people always think is wrong with women: Must be her lady parts.

My gynecologist heard me moaning and said to take my blood pressure, while she stayed on the line. We had one of those cuffs, and a defibrillator, as everyone in my house, including my staff and children, gets CPR and rescue training regularly, and stays up to date. My blood pressure was over the moon, both figures high in the hundreds. My doctor said we had a few minutes to get me to the hospital, which was just down the street, making clear that she would be standing outside waiting. She had been my attending doctor for my miscarriages and knew the fragility of my situation.

I was stuffed into our truck, my legs not really following my thoughts any longer. I slumped against the passenger door in the front seat. When we got to the California Pacific Medical Center, the burly attendant opened the door and I fell out upside down and backward into his warm and strong arms and passed out. I had made it. I let go. Somehow I had hung on until I fell into safety’s arms.

They hustled me inside and onto a gurney, and immediately put me into a CAT scan machine, the noise so loud it was as if someone were hammering my mind from the inside out.

After I first woke up, Dr. Handsome told me the transfer ambulance had arrived. They have everything you need at the other hospital, he said, and gave me an encouraging smile. Two young men picked me up and moved me onto another portable gurney and I passed out yet again. As they were putting me into the ambulance, that gurney’s wheel hit the bottom of the truck and stirred me. I opened my eyes into the bright sunlight and saw a paramedic with white light surrounding him and wasn’t sure if I was still alive as I passed out again.

I woke up in Moffitt-Long’s neurological ICU. There were no rooms, just a nurses’ central unit with beds in a circle around it, each one on a scale to measure our body weight and mass, curtains in between and in front of us. Lots of machines and hoses—it looked like a Fritz Lang movie. The sounds and lights of all those machines haven’t left me still. They are wrapped up with the memory of the televisions hanging from the ceiling, still playing the endless images of the planes flying into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. I took it in.

The next day I came to as I was being wheeled down the hall by a young male orderly. I asked where he was taking me.

To the operating theater.

For what? I began to panic some more; this panic thing was starting to become more and more my full-time state of being.

For exploratory brain surgery.

But no one talked to me about it.

Oh, yeah, the papers were signed—you’re all good.

I asked him to stop for a second; I needed a minute to absorb all of this. But he told me that we didn’t have time or we would lose the room. I could not get him to stop or call the doctor to help me in any way. So I did what I could: I gathered myself and stood up on that moving gurney. Which took every last bit of might, of strength, I had left.

Nurses and other hospital personnel came running. She doesn’t want to go to the surgery room, the orderly announced. A nurse came and asked me why, and I told her that I had been signed up for exploratory brain surgery without my knowledge or consent and with no discussion of what that could or would mean. The nurse said she would get the doctor.

He came running, white coat flapping, and told me to lie down and do what I was told. A fine hello, I have to say. He told us all that someone had signed all of the papers and we were well under way. He showed us all proudly that he was holding a fax from People magazine and said he had just spoken to them, told them of the situation, and he knew exactly what to do. (Ultimately, he had given them an incorrect diagnosis, which they ran.) He held it like a talisman, as if because it was written, it was true. Which it wasn’t, by the way. Oh, if only he had been right.

I looked at the nurse, who stared at me with the same sense of incredulity, like, This doctor is a jackass of astonishing proportions. I realized that, brain bleed or not, this was a mess that I had to handle—now.

Still standing, ass out of my gown on the gurney, not giving up any ground, I turned to the doctor and said, You’re fired.

He said, What? You can’t fire me! and the nurse said, Doctor, I’m afraid she just did, and directed the orderly to take me back to my room.

That quick-thinking nurse saved my life. She was a pretty, blond fifty-something woman who I later realized was not dissimilar to someone I would get to be simply because she had the courage to be brave and true for me. To do her job with the authority and knowledge that she was the one to make that call, she stood in her dignity.

By now my entire family had rushed to the neurological unit: my mother, my father, my sister, and my brothers, Mike and Patrick. They were shocked and confused, as they had been led to believe that I was sleeping and shouldn’t be disturbed, not that I had been signed up for exploratory brain surgery without anyone being consulted.

My room became a free-for-all. Tempers were out of control. The just-fired doctor was still holding his People magazine fax. My older brother, Mike, wanted a fistfight; Kelly, who is a nurse, wanted medical facts; my friends who had arrived were like sentries, keeping the wrong people out and the right people in.

My friend Donna Chavous was there. Chavous and I had been through all kinds of hellcat endeavors in the past, including the day I became famous. We were at a movie and came out afterward and the whole theater of people was just hanging out in front and didn’t leave. We slowly came to realize they were looking at us. Chavous whispered, Run, to me and we did; we ran like thieves in the night, and yes, they all ran after us. We ran and ran across streets of moving cars, into a restaurant, into its kitchen, and slid under its chef’s cutting table. The owner, having locked the front door behind us, leaned down and asked us what he could do for us. Chavous got tequila, I got a martini. The owner, knowing better than we did what was happening, asked us where our car was and got a waiter to go and get it and helped us to get out amid the frenzy and get home. Chavous and I had been martial arts partners, always racing each other in our cars while talking on our speakerphones, getting to the dojo late and doing push-ups on our knuckles to be allowed entrance. Yes, always pushing it, and having a ball. We always took care of each other.

Now she stayed for the entire time, days and nights, sleeping in a window seat at the hospital. Just to be sure.

My mother was determined no one was going to . . . well, as she would say, fuck with my kid. She had had it. This was too goddamn far. She was scared. Scared to stillness, scared beyond her rage, beyond her humor, beyond all telling. So she sat, outside the curtain. There, she sat. Purse on her lap. Tight-lipped, fierce, immobile, strong, and brittle. She guarded that spot and no one, but no one, was getting to me again until I knew and agreed.

I asked the fired flapping doctor to explain the steps of the proposed brain surgery to me. He was profoundly offended, still waving his fax, his fifteen minutes. He felt we didn’t have the time and believed I really didn’t need to know. I felt I really did. I felt I deserved knowledge about what this potential brain surgery would mean for me. Go figure.

You shave my head and then cut the first layer of skin. Do you fold it back or remove it? Then the bone, do you remove it? Where do you put it? We are in earthquake country; does it go on a tray or in a sterile box? Then what? How large of a section of my head will you remove? Will you cut through the nerves? I have always been