Plucky Survivors See America 2010: February 7, 2010
What we put on the website about our Plucky Mini trip and what actually happened are two different things. Part of this was just practical – we got back to the hotel on the late side and it had been a long day so there wasn’t the time or the energy to do a full on Plucky recap. But the bigger part was that we both knew that reality of what was going on wouldn’t have been that much fun for us to write about and certainly not that much fun for others to read about.
Here’s what really happened.
The rain was mostly of the drizzle variety but the sky loomed gray and oppressive, like a big wet blanket smothering the city. I had to work that morning and by that point Mary was sleeping for most of the day so we agreed to start the Plucky Mini trip at around 2pm.
I hadn’t seen her in several weeks. We still talked on the phone and exchanged e-mails, albeit with increasing irregularity, but I hadn’t laid eyes on her in the better part of a month. In retrospect, I think she knew she wasn’t going to make it as far back as July of 2009, when the chemo stopped working. She put on her Plucky face and tried to couch it in “we’re not giving up yet” platitudes, and in fact I think a part of her still held on to that. But another part of her started to shut down at that moment. She withdrew more and more over the months as her health deteriorated, spending a lot of time sleeping, reading, and generally avoiding the rest of the world, which she still couldn’t believe was going to go on without her. “The nerve!” she would say.
The news in January that there was simply nothing left to do was, for her, more than just confirmation that she was going to die. It was the moment that she fully and completely gave up. Mary was not ready to die, not by a long shot, but she had placed so much faith in what her doctor had said to her over the years – that there was always hope, always one more thing to try, always a plan B, or C, or G – that when he said there were no more things to try, it took what was left of her fighting spirit.
Which is not to say that she wasn’t still Mary. The Plucky Mini trip was my idea but I had mostly forgotten about it under the circumstances. She is the one who wanted to do it, despite protestations from me, Steve, and just about everyone else around her that it probably wasn’t a great idea. She simply didn’t care. As long as she was alive, there would be Plucky.
And so I showed up, damp but determined, at her house and saw her and the sight took my breath away. Her hair had started to grow back, a patchy quilt-work of wisps, darker than I had ever seen it on her, almost black. Her face was sallow and gaunt, her limbs thin – painfully thin – and her abdomen was distended from the liver, swollen with cancer. This was especially offensive to her; she felt that it was unfair that she looked “fat.” She was moving slowly and breathing in gasps and bursts, every step and every breath a determination. Yet to me, she looked beautiful, almost radiant. She always did to me and it never had anything to do with her looks. It was her quintessential Mary-ness, which despite the exterior and despite the ravages the disease had taken with her body, was still there.
I sat with her at the dining room table while Steve did the final packing preparations and I tried one last time to make sure that she was up to doing this. She insisted that she was, although she also admitted that she was nervous about the whole thing. We both hoped that it would wind up being a good thing – another distraction in the long line of distractions that kept us from looking too closely at whatever malady was affecting us at that particular moment.
She grabbed her purse – bright green, compact and stylish – that she loved with abandon and we took a moment to have Steve take our picture. It was tradition – the pre-Plucky photo, usually taken at the airport, often with the two of us not quite awake yet. This one was at her front door, her leaning into me as I almost towered over her, my arms gently holding hers.
Before the Plucky mini could begin there was an errand to run. We stopped at the Hollywood Forever so that Steve could run in a deposit check for the funeral and cremation services they had recently planned. Mary and I sat in the car waiting and the conversation turned to that day, upcoming but hopefully not soon.
“Have you decided what you want for your funeral?” I asked.
“Serious,” she said. “Traditional. I want everyone in black.”
“I will leave my pink feather boa at home,” I promised.
“Well, maybe save it for the reception,” she smiled. “Here’s the thing. When Steve’s grandmother, who is 103 now, passes it will be cause for celebration of a life lived long and well. For me, it’s just sad.”
I didn’t have anything to say to that.
“And the service is right here in the chapel,” which she pointed at across the road.
“How big is it?” I asked, not able to shut off the organizational point of my brain.
“It holds about 150 people,” she said.
“Uh Mary…” I said carefully, “I can think of 150 people who are going to want to come to your funeral without even really trying all that hard.”
“It’ll be fine,” she shrugged as if to say that even if it wasn’t, it wasn’t going to be her problem.
She rattled off other details – who she wanted to speak, who she wanted to sing, how she wanted a traditional second line New Orleans style procession with the casket afterward. She paused, not looking at me, and then said, “Do you know what you want to do?”
“Yes,” I said. “I want to sing something.”
“Okay,” she said. And that was the end of that.
Task completed, Steve returned to the car and we were off to the Self Realization Fellowship Temple in Hollywood. There really wasn’t much to the place – a couple of simple buildings, some nicely landscaped grounds that we really couldn’t appreciate because it was raining, and a gift shop. A very nice lady let us look inside the main temple, which was pretty much like any church except with nicer lamps. It was obvious what Mary was thinking when she asked how many people the room held but the deposit had already been dropped off at Hollywood Forever so that pretty much settled that.
We made our way through the wet streets of LA to the Museum of Death, a stop that continued to horrify people when we told them we were doing it. It kind of horrified me when we actually did do it although for different reasons. Don’t get me wrong; I like the macabre as much as the next guy with a potentially fatal disease, but this place was too much for me. Filled with gruesome displays of serial killers, murder, and mayhem complete with stomach churning photos and video, this is not a place for the faint of heart. I did find the recreation of the Heaven’s Gate bedroom, complete with furnishings from the house, morbidly fascinating and the artwork painted by various and sundry serial killers was interesting from a psychological perspective, but most of the rest of it just made me kind of ill. Mary, on the other hand, ate it up. About the only things that gave her pause were the taxidermy animals (including a dog – not good) and the video showing footage of people meeting their maker in spectacularly bloody ways. Even she had limits. But everything else captivated her and she probably could’ve stayed for much longer if she had been feeling better. Or perhaps she just saw how green around the gills I was getting and took pity on me.
Even though we had only been out for 90 minutes or so, Mary needed a break so we went to check in at the hotel. We chose the Sofitel in West Hollywood specifically because of our fantastic experience at the Philadelphia location on Red, White, and Plucky and by fantastic experience we were mainly referring to the beds. The West Hollywood location didn’t disappoint from that perspective but the rest of the hotel was a bit too pretentious for our tastes with the kind of black marble/avant-garde sculpture/uptight employees in suits atmosphere that makes us itch. We were expecting snooty but we had hoped for the French variety and not the Hollywood version, which we saw every day.
After giving Mary a chance to rest for a while, we set out in the rain again for the Magic Castle in Hollywood. Built in 1909, the Victorian estate was the home of the guy who owned most of the surrounding land at the time. Perched on a hill overlooking Tinseltown, the gothic structure has loomed large on the landscape throughout its history, most notably when it became the home for the Academy of Magic Arts in 1963.
It contains a restaurant, bar, and several theaters showcasing all sorts of prestidigitation, from close-up style card tricks to grander illusions. To visit you have to be a member or the guest of a member and since those memberships costs thousands of dollars, we were lucky in having Mary’s friends Arlene and Tom invite us for dinner and some shows.
By the time we arrived, Mary’s energy level had faded dramatically and a combination of the illness and the drugs she was taking to fight the pain left her woozy. She managed to stay “present” through the dinner but she could only eat a few bits of the deviled egg platter she ordered and her speech would become slurred at times. I powered through a steak that didn’t do much for me, but I’m not sure if it was the actual cut of meat or the circumstances that made it less than appetizing.
Arlene had managed to get us priority seating at the shows so Mary wouldn’t have to stand for longer than she needed to. We got to see a truly remarkable comic-magician who did lots of mend-bending slight-of-hand tricks and then moved into the main theater for the big show. As we waited for it to begin, Mary leaned in close to me and asked if she could rest her head on my shoulder. I put my arm around her and we sat there like that, surrounded by the chattering audience and each lost in our quiet thoughts. Mine drove me to the verge of tears but I didn’t let myself go over the edge. It wasn’t because I was embarrassed to cry in public – I cry all the time. But in that moment I felt as though that would be some sort of betrayal to the spirit, if not the reality, of what we were doing. There is no crying in Plucky Survivors, at least not for ourselves.
The headliner for the evening was an old-school magician and by that I mean he, his tricks, and even his assistant had obviously been around for a very long time. And it wasn’t just his props that appeared to be held together with spit and bailing wire. It was deliciously cheesy in all the ways you would want it to be and Mary and I both watched with our mouths slightly agape. I think we were both writing in our minds what we would say about it on the Plucky Survivors website when we wrote it all up for our readers, struggling to find a way to be accurate without being cruel. I’m sure Mary could’ve come up with something better than how I described it above but I think you get the point.
Although there were other shows to see, Mary couldn’t do any more so we said our goodbyes to Arlene and Tom and made our way in the ever increasing rain back to the Sofitel. It wasn’t until we got there that we realized we hadn’t been good about taking pictures like we usually do and were especially sad that we had missed an opportunity to get ourselves photographed in our relatively rare dressed up state (The Castle requires finery).
There was one last picture, taken in the hallway of the Sofitel, of Mary and Steve. It was the last taken of them together and the last of Plucky Survivors.
Mary had a very bad night. The fluid that was collecting in her lungs had been drained before, a process that was incredibly painful but provided some measure of relief. Unfortunately, the relief was temporary and by this time the fluid was back, causing her to have to fight for every breath. During the night it got so bad that she considered having Steve take her a few blocks away to Cedars Sinai Hospital to have it drained again but the combination of the fear of the procedure and her thinking it would “ruin the trip” kept her from doing it.
By morning it was clear that we couldn’t go on. Some of it had to do with the persistent rain, which was worse out in the desert where Mary and I were going to be traveling after dropping off Steve. But most of it was because she just didn’t have the strength to continue.
This hit Mary hard. The fact that she couldn’t do these relatively simple things, that she could no longer travel even locally, was spirit crushing in a lot of ways. There had been many beginnings of the end but this really was the moment in which the end seemed more real, more tangible, and more evident in physical ways than it every had been before.
Still, Mary wanted to go on – if not that day then soon. The rest of our Plucky Mini trip with the Bunny Museum, the Banana Museum, and the Nixon and Reagan Libraries was going to happen, a part of her (and me, I suppose) wanted to believe. She had gotten through bad patches before and I think she was holding on to the idea that this would be another bad patch that she would get through.
Hence what we wrote on the Plucky Survivors website – a brief missive that tried to remain optimistic.
By Sunday, when we were going to go to the observatory, her condition continued to worsen and although she wanted to go, the rest of us decided for her that it wasn’t going to happen. She wasn’t very happy with that – she wasn’t used to people making decisions for her – but I think she was also relieved. At least it wasn’t her saying she couldn’t do it; it was someone else saying it for her.
And so it was that Plucky Survivors see America ended. But there was still one more trip that we needed to take together.