“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.
The anger welled up in my sobs. “How could you leave me with all this mess, the lawsuit, the boat, the house! I don’t know what to do. You’d better give me a sign that everything is going to be okay.”
It was out of nowhere. From the sky came not one, not two, not three, but a whole
