Tara Ison - Reeling Through Life - How I Learned to Live, Love and Die at the Movies

DR. STEELE

A girl like that, so alive! So entitled to live! And this thing, this growth comes along and puts a period to it! Makes you almost wish it happened on the table. .

and I think Yes, what a great idea! This is my big chance; for many months I had been trying to hide and ignore another kind of toxic weed in my garden-mind, an inexplicable depression that had taken flourishing, choking root and left me increasingly in a state of dull despair — I was anything but so alive . But now I get it into my tumorous head that I can will myself to die on the table ; I can actually make that happen, and then it will all be over, the quiet wood-shavings stillness of an end without the suffering and decay and smell. Then it would be just like going to sleep for a long time. No bruising needlefuls of poison, no repeated operations to snip out metastasized, weedy bits. Just a graceful acceptance of the punctuated end to my life, a faint, sheer shine of the heroic, my arm elegantly extended over my head and then over with. What can you say about a twenty-two-year-old girl who died? they will ask about me, and I hope they will say I was beautiful and brilliant , or maybe at least pretty and smart. I’ll be well and normal, just like everybody else , right up until the end. It is not a tragic difference that I know when I am going to die, it is a gift, a rare opportunity; if I can orchestrate the circumstances of my death, then of course I can be all ready, I can meet it beautifully and finely . For months I’d been feeling I had a life without the living; now I can have the death without the dying.

Of course, nobody orchestrates his own death — or choreographs, stages, directs his own death — as well or as literally as Bob Fosse in his semiautobiographical All That Jazz , inspired by his real-life heart attack while simultaneously editing the film Lenny and directing Chicago on the Great White Way. 70Roy Scheider dances and sings as Joe Gideon, Fosse’s alter-ego, a self-destructive, self-loathing, alcoholic, pill-popping film and theatre director whose death is brought to imagined, hallucinatory life as Broadway spectacle: A death with jazz hands and show-stopping musical numbers, death as the ultimate variety show, emceed by Ben Vereen, the finale a musical farewell to all the people in Joe’s life — mostly women — he has done wrong:

JOE

Bye-bye, life! Bye-bye, happiness! Hello, loneliness. I think I’m gonna die. . 71

Starring in your own death might be a little self-indulgent, sure, but I can relate to Joe/Bob’s perfectionist desire to turn death into performance art, to want that final editorial cut, to exercise that degree of aesthetic control — and who wouldn’t want Jessica Lange as one’s own personal, flirtatious Angel of Death?

Maybe I can’t sing or dance like Joe/Bob, but I can still go out with style. I can still create my final tableau — like Harold, but with Maude’s follow-through. So, I plan my going-away party, with all my family and friends, to be held two weeks hence, the night before I will return to the hospital to die tragically on the table during brain surgery. Party favors will be wispy snips of my long hair, tucked inside little brain-shaped lockets — like Judith, I don’t want my hair cut off, that is my biggest concern, and I know they will not be cutting off “just a little bit”; they are going to shave my whole head, and so I may as well incorporate that motif into the mise — en-scène. I will blow up white helium balloons and draw sad unsmiley faces on them with a black Sharpie, draw little scars on their balloon-head tops. I will draw a large cartoony brain on the wall and we’ll all play “Pin the Tumor on the Left Frontal Lobe.” In France I’d played a Christmas game called Le Tirage du Roi , “Drawing the King,” where a tiny porcelain baby Jesus is hidden inside a cake and whoever finds it in their slice is proclaimed King for the evening; we will play Le Tirage du Tumor ; I will hide a tiny plastic tumor in a brain-shaped cake, and the winner will wear a pointy little beanie. I will bravely embrace everyone good-bye. Go, and love some more , I will say, holding a daisy as I take my lonely but brave exit. Like Maude, I can’t imagine a lovelier farewell. Bye-bye, life! I think I’m gonna die.

My mother, who has needed an enormous amount of attention and comforting from me since my seizure and diagnosis, is horrified by all this planning, reduced to babbling helplessness and tears; I remember Harold explaining to Maude how he felt as an adolescent, what started his obsession with the dramatic power of suicide, when an accidental explosion at school resulted in his mother being misinformed of his death, how he was actually present to witness her reaction:

HAROLD

These two policemen came in, they found my mother and told her I was killed in the fire. She put one hand up to her forehead. With the other she reached out as if groping for support. And with this long sigh, she collapsed in their arms. .

(crying)

I decided right then that I’d enjoy being dead.

The more collapsingly upset my mother gets, the more I feel she is co-opting my tragedy, and the more I take an odd, shameful satisfaction in my insistent, self-indulgent theatrics. There is something gratifying in being, for the first time in my life, a problem , an actual source of worry and distress; this acting-out is the extra nuts on my sundae, this feeling of being authentically, messily, three-dimensionally present in the room. This limelight death is all mine, and I am not going to share. Like Sol, I will be “going home” on my own terms. Like Jenny, I will be the boss, get whatever I want. It’s my party, and I’ll die if I want to.

But there is no party, no darkly victorious or spectacular climax. For two weeks I am so doped up and energyless on antiseizure medication I can do little beyond lie on my couch or stagger around my apartment. My doctor had not wanted me to be left alone, so my friend Michelle had come from across the country to stay with me, to be sure I didn’t crack my head in a seizure-fall on the pavement or seize-drown in the tub. The night before surgery, after I have emptied out my refrigerator and finished writing instructions for my funeral (cremation, please, it is sensibly space-saving, and I realize I don’t want to decompose, to become food for either worms or people) and good-bye notes to my friends, I start to cry. I cry and cry and can’t stop. I’m scared to die, I am not ready, there is no getting ready for this no matter how much orchestrating you might try to do, and is this what falling off a cliff in slow motion is like, when you don’t want to hurry up and hit the ground? I wonder if maybe there is a God (there are no atheists in foxholes), if maybe there is a heaven, and do I get to go there even if I didn’t believe in it until my foxhole now? And will Janie and my grandmother be there, dancing on top of cloud-tables and lighting up their cigarettes like a pretumor Judith, and will they forgive me for not doing more? I feel like a baby, a frightened two-and-a-half-year-old clutching for some adult’s hand, wishing for someone to disappear my pain. I feel like a failure, humiliated by my powerlessness and unglamorous fear. I feel a sudden warmth, and I realize Michelle has come to lie in bed beside me — I’d wanted her to hold me, I mean really hold me, next to me , but was afraid to ask, and she has done so without my having to ask, and I am so then-and-forever grateful. She holds me close for what seems like long sobbing hours until I am able to sleep.