I Must Say (33 page)

She took my hands in hers and said, “Thank you, baby.” The choice I'd made, she told me, was the right one.

The New York doctor's news, alas, was not good: her CA-125 number was now at 52, and radiation was the next step. A whole new phase of debilitation. Nonetheless, Nancy wasn't going to let something like metastasizing cancer and radiation treatments get in the way of living her life. We had plans to spend our Christmas vacation skiing with the kids at our home in Sun Valley, Idaho, followed by a few days in January at the Martin residence in St. Barth's. And off we went.

I
had signed on that year to be a regular in the third season of Glenn Close's FX series
Damages
, playing Leonard Winstone, the sad-sack lawyer for a Bernie Madoff–esque Ponzi schemer.
Damages
's creators, Daniel Zelman and the brothers Todd and Glenn Kessler, liked using comic actors in serious roles, trusting them to be looser and more inventive with dialogue, and
they had already enlisted Lily Tomlin and Ted Danson to great effect.

The filming took place over the winter of 2009–'10, and honestly, to this day, I don't know how the hell I pulled it off, given what my family was going through. I'm no Method actor, but in that case, my state of mind informed my performance. There was a day in December 2009 when I received devastating news from Nancy's doctors, that her CA-125 number had skyrocketed to 160. She and the kids were already in Sun Valley. I was no longer going to withhold information from her, but I decided that I would wait to tell her the bad news in person rather than over the phone. That night we shot a scene where Leonard goes to a nursing home to visit his frail old mother, only to be informed that she has died. I can see it on my face in that scene: the conflation of a character who's just received news of his mother's death with an actor who's just received news that his wife's cancer is aggressively taking over her body. I'm quite good in that episode, but I wouldn't recommend my process.

Terminal illness is so deceptive. There are wonderful days when the sick person rallies and it seems like there is genuine reason for hope, and rough days when the illusions come crashing down. I have a photo of a group of us gathered that winter in Sun Valley: Nan and me, Tom and Rita, Bruce and Patti Springsteen, and Jann Wenner and his partner, Matt Nye. Nancy is the only one in a white ski jacket, so she stands out, and she appears radiant, the picture of health. But I also remember a night in St. Barth's, the last time we went there together, where we went to bed early, around nine, because Nan felt utterly drained of life force. We lay there side by side, wordlessly holding hands, both of us looking up at the ceiling, both of us knowing that we were at the beginning of something very bad.

By February Nancy was sicker than ever, and she wasn't expected to make it through March. I abruptly pulled out of two big things I was supposed to do over a ten-day period, one of them being the opening number at the 2010 Academy Awards. Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin were cohosting that year (they'd just done Nancy Meyers's
It's Complicated
), and I was meant to duet with Neil Patrick Harris on the curtain-raising song—a number that, ironically, was about teaming up and not doing things alone. Neil valiantly carried on solo. The second big thing was the closing ceremonies of the Vancouver Olympics, in which I'd have appeared alongside such Canadian luminaries as Catherine O'Hara and Michael J. Fox.

Whether or not the closing ceremonies were a fitting tribute to my homeland is arguable, but Nancy's opinion was clear. Watching the gaudy spectacle at our home in the Palisades, she turned to me and said, “It's the only upside of my cancer.”

“What is?” I said.

“You didn't have to be in that.”

T
he oncologists at Cedars-Sinai told me that there was no longer any point in putting Nancy through further chemo unless she wanted to give it a try. I put the proposition to Nancy. She said without hesitation, “Let's go. Let's do it.”

I've learned that there are two worlds in the land of terminal illness. The first is the one where you hold out hope of a shot at getting better:
I've got to get the furs to the cleaners for summer storage, because I'll need them to be ready for next winter!
The second is the world where you graciously accept death as an inevitability:
Bring me paper and a pen so that I may write letters to be read posthumously at our daughter's wedding.
You can't really live in both worlds; they're mutually exclusive.

Nancy was emphatically of that first world, not that there's anything wrong with the second. And somehow the next round of chemo, though it didn't bring her all the way back, put her upright and out among the living again. She resumed driving herself to tennis, and in July I found myself flying with Nan back to our summer cottage in Canada—a scenario that, in the privacy of my own mind, I had never in a million years envisioned coming true.

As late as the end of July, Nancy was still lowering herself into a kayak to go for a paddle in the lake, her never-say-die Kate Hepburn instincts overpowering cancer and common sense. But by August she was losing steam. We left Snug Harbour on the sixth day of the month. Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn were among the few who knew how seriously ill Nancy was, but they'd kept the news from Kate Hudson, their daughter, until a few days before our departure. Kate, Goldie reported to me over the phone, was inconsolable: she adored Nancy. And she and Rita Wilson insisted upon sending a private plane to deliver us back to L.A.

We returned to our house in the Palisades, and Dr. Kipper, our internist, visited a day or two later, just to check in. After I walked him to his car, I returned to Nancy, who sat propped up in our bed. “You know, Mart,” she said, “I don't want you to think this is the beginning of the end.”

“I don't!” I said.

“Well, you sure
look
like you do.”

Even at that point, Nancy still believed she might rally—and not entirely without reason, for she had before. She wasn't mournful or mopey. She was pissed off at the situation. Those were oft-spoken Nancy words: “Marty, tell me this wouldn't
piss you off
!” She refused to treat her final days like a weepy, valedictory send-off.

But no further rally was in the offing. Nancy only weakened further, slipping gently into unconsciousness within a matter of days. She finally passed away on August 21, 2010. Before she lost consciousness, as, struggling for breath, she saw nine paramedics hurry into our bedroom after I'd placed a frantic 911 call, she calmly turned to me, took my hand, and said, “Marty, let me go.”

And so we did. With me and all three kids in our bed, holding her hand, we let her go.

Nancy's death was awful, by far the most awful thing I've ever been through. Yet life had given me valuable experience to draw upon—not just for my own benefit, but for my kids'. And so I put it to use. The night before Nan died, when we knew it was just a matter of time, I took a moment with Henry, our youngest, to soak in our backyard Jacuzzi. He needed loving and calming. Katherine and Oliver were in the house, keeping vigil.

“Henry, I know it seems unimaginable, but you are being empowered tonight,” I told him. “You are being given something that is horrible, but is also a life lesson. This will make you stronger. This will make you more determined. You'll be in your office somewhere, someday, and some pompous asshole will say something to you. And you'll supposedly be upset, and you'll supposedly be fearful of your boss's reaction. But then you'll think, ‘This is gravy. This is fine. I couldn't care less about this prick. I'm not upset
now
. I was upset the night my mother died.'”

N
ora Ephron took over. Just hours after we lost Nan, she and Nick were at our door, bearing platters of food. So were Eugene and Deb Levy: four kind, familiar faces, a tremendous comfort to me and my kids. The first thing Nora said when she presented herself was, “We loved Nancy, and we love you.” She really turned it on that night, regaling us all with tales of interning in the JFK White House, and how knock-kneed she'd been by the sexy president: “I'm telling you, even the amount of
shirt cuff
he showed wearing a suit jacket was sexy!” Nora and company took our minds out of the moment in the most considerate, compassionate way.

The next day, the condolence calls started coming in, and the Palisades moms were telling me that I needed to open the house and let people express their grief. I'd been put off by the whole concept of the wake-style open house ever since my brother David's death, when, to my dismay, I saw people laughing and drinking in our living room in my family's deepest moment of sorrow.
But Nora advised me to let it happen. She planned all the food for that day and made sure our house was ready for the onslaught.

The day after our Short-family shivah, Nora came by with a huge platter of chicken at dinnertime, even though there was a ton of leftover food in the house. “Nora,” I said, “it's just us tonight. We already have so much food.”

Nora replied, “And now you have more food. This is the way Jews do it. I don't like everything about being Jewish, but I like how we do this.”

For a day after the visitor stampede, there was a pleasant lull—a merciful period of quiet. Then, on day three after Nancy's death, I took a call from Paul Shaffer. He said, “Dave wants to reach out to you. That okay?”

I said, “Of course. Why, did you just tell him?”

“Marty,” Paul said, “it's on the Internet.”

And almost on cue, as he said the words “on the Internet,” my buzzer started going, my phone started ringing nonstop, and there were flower deliveries and paparazzi massed at my gate. And all I could think was, Jesus, I've gotta get out of here.

Fortunately, the kids and I had scheduled a trip the next morning to our Canadian refuge in Snug Harbour. We'd already had Nancy's body cremated so that we could spread the ashes up there. We flew from L.A. to Toronto, and then, from Toronto, took a seaplane that touched down right by our dock.

What the kids and I witnessed as the plane floated into the harbor brought tears: all of my siblings, their spouses, and my beloved nephews and nieces lined up on the dock. And flowers everywhere. Kurt Russell, I later found out, had gone to the florist in the next town and bought out the whole store. Then he went to an antiques store and bought flowerpots. Goldie offered to help, but he told her, “It's okay, honey, I gotta do this myself.”
He planted all the flowers in the pots and lined the dock and the pathways leading up to the main house with them.

Paul Shaffer came up, as did Eugene and Deb, and Walter and Laurie, and we turned it into a celebration. Nancy was adamant that there not be any kind of formal memorial or big fuss, so we honored that. We sprinkled some of her ashes by the tree near her beloved tennis court, and the rest in the lake. The plan was for the kids and me to jump
into
the ashes as they dissipated into the water. Oliver was the last to jump, and as he did so, he shouted out, “MOTHER!”

It was cathartic. There was laughter instead of crying, and that night, we had a bonfire and a big dinner for the twenty-five or so people gathered. Songs were sung a capella outside, and then we went inside, where Paul played the piano and we kept on singing. The evening was not unlike our Christmas parties—and just how I imagine Nan would have wanted the night to go.

When everyone had gone off to bed, I sneaked back outside to the still-burning fire in the fire pit, overlooking the lake. I stared into the fire, as if looking into Nan's eyes, and said out loud, with no one else around, “Nan . . . losing you is losing half my soul. I'm not sure if I'll ever get over this, but I know that I'll love you forever. And I promise you, I'll keep our children safe. Love you, baby.”

I couldn't sleep, so I sat there till dawn. And why not? It was a wondrous night, clear and unseasonably warm, stars everywhere in the sky. When she was alive, with me, there was no place Nan loved to sit more.

I
t was now late August. Katherine and Ollie had to go back to their jobs in L.A., and Henry back to Notre Dame for his junior
year. Before Ollie departed, he gave me a hug and whispered in my ear, “Dad, next year, I want this place
filled
.” His meaning was obvious: filled with the energy and laughter and the joy of living that Snug Harbour had always represented to our family.

I think everyone was a little apprehensive of leaving ol' widower Marty alone in his big house in the woods, but it felt completely right to me. I was very clear to everyone: if being here all alone gave me the heebie-jeebies, I'd bail and return to L.A. in a heartbeat.

But I'll tell you, I felt at peace up on the lake. I spent a further three weeks in Canada, and I enjoyed the solitude. I kept a journal to scribble down my jangled thoughts. At one point Mel Brooks phoned me. He had lost his wife, Anne Bancroft, five years earlier, and he gave me what he felt was the most important advice he could impart: “Don't go out with any fucking couples. They'll just piss you off.” Mike Nichols also called, urging me to “just keep the conversation going.” This was valuable wisdom, because the constant banter I maintained with Nancy was like oxygen to me, and to suddenly no longer have it in my life seemed incomprehensible—and, in bad moments, suffocating. In a funny way, I was kind of rooting for something weird to happen, for a sign from my wife. I'd had only that one quasi-paranormal experience as a boy: the profound sadness I felt at summer camp the morning I learned of my brother David's death.

So there I was, sitting in my kitchen in Snug Harbour, staring at a coffee cup for ten minutes:
Move, for Christ's sake! Nan . . . where the hell did you go?

And indeed something odd did happen while I was alone. I'm not saying that it means anything, but it was a little strange. The first night I got to the lake, as night fell, I got up from my armchair to turn on the lights. I went to switch the stairway light
on:
pop
, it flickered out. Next, the upstairs hallway light:
pop
, it flickered out. Next, our bedroom light:
pop
, it flickered out. Then the boys' room:
pop
, it flickered out.