“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 21The Dragonflies
We’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
