Still Talking (24 page)

“Goodbye, Mom,” she’d say as she left.

At such moments, with death in the wings, the past conflicts, the old frustrations and tensions that strain a marriage, become nonsense. I saw them in a new perspective. They were like a broken fingernail-you say, “Ugh, damn”-but never think to be grateful that the fingers are working.

I was very, very grateful that in my own way I had told Edgar how much I loved him. It is tragic when people have no chance to tie up loose ends and never say even three sentences to somebody they love before the person dies. The last time I spoke to my mother, we had an argument on the phone, and the next day she was dead from a heart attack. I never said to her, “You’re wonderful and you’re my mother and you’re my friend and I love you.

You’ve done a great job.” The regret has never left me.

I went home for an hour to distract myself. In the bathroom I went down on the floor, flat out, no knees, like in biblical times. I said, “God, what’s the deal? What do you want?” I said, “You won, God. Here I am on the floor.”

In The Ten Commandments, when Charlton Heston lay down, God spoke to him. So I waited for the lightning and thunder and the big voice telling me, too, “Do this.” Finally I had to accept that God wasn’t into theatrics that night. There was peace in that-getting back to fundamentals, back to the simple faith of “I believe in you, God. Please tell me what I must do.”

Much later, when I told Edgar, our joke became “… and God said, `No more Elizabeth Taylor jokes.’ “

In the hospital we waited eight hours in a room, and I tried to reassure Melissa that nothing was her fault. Edgar, I said, was a heart attack waiting to happen-and we were lucky it happened there with help all around him. In a way she had saved his life.

When Edgar came out of the operating room, he was weak, but essentially fine-until five-thirty that morning when his lungs began to fill with fluid. Gradually he slipped into. a profound unconsciousness the doctors classified as an ICU psychosis-a violent coma. The operation had been a success, but Edgar was lying strapped to the table and barely alive. The roller coaster began-hope and despair, hope and despair.

Every time I had gone home, something terrible happened, so I moved into the hospital. I decided, right or wrong, that Melissa should not live there. She belonged with her friends; the people she could freely talk to.

I was trying to spare her the awful atmosphere of a deathwatch by letting her think that things were going okay. Each day at noon she phoned. Each day after school she insisted on coming to the hospital until long after dark when I would force her to go home, saying, “Daddy is on the mend.”

At the hospital I had a room on Edgar’s floor and shared it with Dorothy Melvin, who unselfishly stayed with me through most of the nightmare.

But still I felt utterly alone, utterly helpless, no source of strength but myself-and I was empty. I believe that one draws strength from others, and I had not realized how much I drew from Edgar.

The ICU was a long, narrow room with eight tables, side by side. On each was a naked figure draped in a hissing, gurgling, pinging ganglion of life-support systems. Otherwise the room was eerily quiet, the special nurses moving surely from patient to patient in a sort of choreography.

Edgar lay on his table looking like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, an oxygen cup over his nose. Tubes ran to his lungs, to a balloon under his heart, to bags of pus and

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bags of urine, to plasma bags and IV bags and to every machine known to man.

I thought, if Edgar is going to hear a voice, feel a touch, smell a smell, it should be mine. Something in all that confusion and pain and madness should be telling him through his coma that it’s okay. Day after day I stood by his head, holding his hand, rubbing his shoulders and face. A nurse said maybe he wasn’t coming back because he was afraid, so I kept telling him, “Edgar, it’s Wednesday morning. The doctor said the operation was a success. ” “Honey, it’s Friday afternoon. Everything’s fine. ” He liked winning, so I told him, “Honey, you’re a day ahead of schedule.” I would appeal to him, “Edgar you cannot do this to Melissa.” I told my good friend Treva Silverman what I was doing, and she said, “His first words are going to be, `Will you shut up! I’m trying to get some sleep.’ “

I would lose my nerve and decide that what I was willing into him was not enough. I had little faith in the doctors. They were not ones we had investigated and gathered from the four corners of the earth. They were the ones we found in the elevator on Thursday night. They turned out to be wonderful, but we could also have found Schwartz the Butcher.

I would go back into the hall, pacing up and down, sure Edgar was going to die. “What have I done?” I wondered. “Is this God saying, `Thought you had a good year, did you? The joke’s on you.’ ” I wondered how I could ever again put on the beads and the feathers and hit the stage screaming nonsense about big rings and first wives. It was the first time I had ever felt my determination was not going to be enough.

My own heart doctor advised me that if I didn’t let up, I was going to be lying right beside Edgar. So now I was walking around in my hospital greens with a portable heart monitor and electrodes fastened onto me while I wept, my face wet and hot, pockets filled with tissues. At good news and bad, tears were a reflex I could never control.

I did not care that people saw me. At first I thought maybe I should be embarrassed walking around looking ninety years old with swollen eyes and a red nose, but a

camaraderie had been formed in those halls-a camaraderie of fear and sorrow but also of comfort. During times like these, patients, relatives, and friends are in pain, and they all know when to look away and when to come over. In the entire month I spent there, only one person had the insensitivity to ask me for an autograph.

Two couples asked me to talk to their terribly ill children-one time when being a celebrity helped because comforting them lessened my own anguish and gave me strength. It gave me back my old facade: See, I am in trouble, but I can reach out to you and your sick child, so I must be a strong person, not this bag of tears.

People reached out to me. One night in the hall outside the ICU, a poor woman connected to a pole draped with every machine in America rolled it all the way down the hall to me and just said, “Don’t forget that Jesus loves you”-and turned and wheeled her pole all the way back. Another man I had seen in the ICU was now ambulatory and rolled his IV holder up to me and said, “For what it’s worth, none of us remember what went on in there.

” That was one of the big things that got me through. When Edgar’s veins were collapsing and they didn’t know where to give him another injection and he was so sick but fighting-I hung on to that.

After a week by his bed one of the nurses said, “If I hear, `Edgar, it’s going to be all right’ one more time …” I was so hurt. Soon afterward, I was pushed aside as a corps of nurses, interns, residents, swooped down on him. I stood in the hall looking through a tiny window, watching outside my feelings, watching myself watching them-as five doctors and nurses bent over his inert body like a human tent working on him, pushing, pumping, socking, injecting. Afterward, I learned they were trying to bring him back to life-that his heart had stopped, that he had died.

Finally the doctors stood up. They had pulled him back. And that nurse I had annoyed came to me and said, “Come in and tell him some more, `Everything is going to be all right.’ ” Everybody wanted to pull him through. The res-

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ident spent most of three nights watching the numbers on the monitor.

I did everything I could think of to wake him. I brought in a tape recorder, hoping his favorite music could strike home. Gershwin, Linda Ronstadt, Ella Fitzgerald. I wore heavy perfume so maybe he would smell me.

I thought perhaps if I made jokes, he would come to and laugh. I pretended his heart monitor was Nielsen ratings and told him, “Edgar, your numbers are terrific.” I said, “If you really want to die, wake up and eat the food here,” and, “I’m going to call Sunny von Bulow and see how things are on the East Coast.” I called into his ear, “Edgar, if you don’t answer me, I’m going to pull the plug.” Nothing. “Edgar, do you hear me? One. TWo. Three.

Okay, I’ve pulled your plug. Damn it, I pulled out your razor.”

A nurse said to me, “He’s going to make it. He’s like a turtle,” and I started to cry. Edgar had given me a diamond turtle pin because my career had always been like a turtle-ugly little struggling steps-so right away I put on that pin and never took it off-and did not worry that people would think, Mrs. Rich Bitch wearing diamonds while her husband dies.

One night at 2:00 A.M. I was there beside Edgar, and Billy Sammeth came by.

We began helping the nurse make cold packs by filling rubber gloves with ice. Then we got silly and blew up the gloves into balloons. With people dying around us, the long, shadowy room lit only by a light at the nurse’s desk and the green glow of computer screens-Billy and I laughed hysterically as we hit fivefingered balloons back and forth across my husband’s body. Totally macabre.

When a situation becomes realty awful, I get silly and laugh, make it absurd. The laughter helps me convince myself, “I can get through this.” I feel a lightness, a release. I suppose that is why I am a comedian-I can do that for myself and for audiences.

Another time Billy and I were riding down in an elevator crowded with doctors. Suddenly Billy turned to me and said, “They sued him and they won.

The man doesn’t have a house, a car, doesn’t have any practice left.” The

elevator became very, very quiet. “I would be a witness all over again after what that butcher did,” Billy went on, “and I actually enjoyed lying on the stand.” You could hear a stethoscope drop. I tried to remember everything funny that happened so I could make Edgar laugh when he woke up.

Even humor could not defend me in the second week when I came into the ICU

and found a crowd of doctors around Edgar’s bed, bringing him back after his heart had stopped for the second time. When I went home for a few hours of rest, Melissa asked me if there was anything new. “Nothing,” I lied. She said, “Tell me the truth.” So I took her arm, and we walked up and down the long hall the length of our house. We must have walked a mile. I told her what she already knew, that Daddy might die.

It was the first time we had actually verbalized the truth of what had happened to our nice little life. We were saying out loud to each other, “Okay, we can never put it together again the same way, so let’s see if we can step into the next chapter. “

We kept walking, up and down, up and down, arm in arm, talking about everything-what I wanted for her, what Edgar wanted. I talked about the importance of family, how sad it was that Edgar and I never had other children so there would be a crowd walking together, not just the two of us. Suddenly Melissa said, “Mom, I’ve got to say it. Maybe this is Daddy’s time.”

Melissa saying this was a tremendous comfort to me. I was struggling so hard to get him through, to keep it from being his time. But how much pain do you put somebody through? Maybe we should accept the worst, she was saying, so that if it happens, it will be easier to bear.

Without realizing it, we were preparing ourselves mentally. Nature does that for you. We were constructing in our minds a future without Edgar, which was very important at that moment. Until that Thursday, I did not think I could go on without him. Now, with Melissa’s help, I knew we really could go on, no matter what. I drew a great deal of strength from that.

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I wrote Edgar’s obituary that night. If he died, I wanted it to be correct and complete. Nobody knew Edgar’s history, the important jobs he had held.

People thought of him only as Joan Rivers’s husband-and I was sick of that.

When I finished the obituary, I felt peaceful. I had faced what had to be faced.

After two weeks of coma, doctors began warning me there might be brain damage, and we talked about letting him die. I think I could have done it, but nobody was giving me a solid judgment; it was always maybe.

I had a performance scheduled at the Century Plaza Hotel, and Billy Sammeth persuaded me to keep the date for my own sanity. I was amazed to go through traffic and see living people and realize they had been there all this time, while my whole world was the UCLA hospital. Daily life had been continuing full throttle, and here I was up onstage in front of people who had come here to be happy, and could be happy. Nobody in the audience was thinking about tubes in the throat and watching heart monitors. Everybody was alive and having a good time and flooding the room with an energy of life. I soaked it up-but it had nothing to do with reality. It felt like a movie. The only place that felt real was the hospital, those halls, that bedside, that air sounding with gurgles and pings and the whoosh, whoosh of respirators.

One day, weeks after Edgar was first admitted to the hospital, a nurse was holding his hand, and suddenly his hand moved, felt her fingers and worked down to her fingernails, which were short. “Where’s Joan?” he said.

I rushed to his bed-but he was gone again, the same silent body of the past weeks. I was devastated. “Edgar, open your eyes!” I yelled. “Enough of this! Open your eyes!” He opened them and then slipped away. I felt then that I was getting through, but the neurologists talked to me again about brain damage from oxygen starvation, preparing me for my husband drooling in a bed, preparing me for the terrifying possibility that he, in tremendous pride, might want to die.

The next day I persuaded those wonderful nurses-they really saved Edgar’s life-to use a child’s oxygen tent instead of the oxygen mask that had clearly been irritating him. They were adjusting it over his head and torso while I was taping it to the wall, barking out instructions to anyone who would listen, when suddenly I heard Edgar’s voice say, “Joan, stop trying to run the hospital.” He had come back.