The Time of My Life (26 page)

As I sank deeper into this hole, and drank more and more, Lisa got to the point where she didn’t even recognize me. I had always been resilient, but this person she was living with was beaten down, defeated. Work had always been my cure for feeling depressed, but even that wasn’t working anymore.

Lisa was struggling with her own rough patch. Seeing me in pain couldn’t help but cause her pain, too. And she also quit smoking during this period, which was about a hundred times harder than she expected, leading to increased feelings of frustration. We were quickly becoming like a couple of rowboats lost in the ocean, looking around for the safety of land but seeing only endless depths ready to swallow us up.

We’d always dealt with whatever issues came up in our relationship. But the biggest issue that cropped up between us in this period was one we couldn’t seem to get through. It had to do with a deep temperamental difference between us—the difference between how a Swayze deals with demons and how the rest of the world does.

For years I had been dealing with my demons—feelings of inadequacy, voices trying to undercut me, fears that I was never good enough. The natural instinct is to push them away or ignore them, but the truth is, they always come back. So instead
of trying to defeat them, I’ve tried to use them, to harness that energy rather than denying it. It’s a delicate balancing act, trying to toe this line—I went to some very dark places, really struggling with myself, in my efforts to control these negative feelings. And just like all the Swayzes, I never could do anything halfway. When the demons came back worse than ever in this period, I plunged right down into the fray with them.

I found levels of bottom that I didn’t even know existed. It wasn’t just about drinking, it was about allowing myself to go to these darkest places, allowing myself to feel all the fear and anger and despair that most people spend lifetimes pushing away. Yet as deep as I went, I still felt I was in control. I knew I was dangerously close to the line, but I was choosing to be there.

But for Lisa, this was too much. Seeing me descend into these feelings was scary for her, and my responses to those feelings frightened her, too. There was a lot of anger during this period, and a lot of raw emotion that came out in sudden, jarring spurts. In Lisa’s eyes, I was going off the deep end, even though I didn’t believe I was. She was afraid one of us would end up dead, and she couldn’t take that feeling.

So Lisa made a decision. Without telling me, she packed a couple of suitcases and took off one morning before I woke up. She knew that if she told me she was planning to leave, I would have done anything and everything to try to talk her out of it, including throwing myself in front of the car to keep her from driving off. She didn’t want a fight. She felt she had to leave for her own sanity and safety, and she wasn’t about to put the matter up for discussion.

When I woke up and found Lisa gone, I was crushed. And
angry. I couldn’t believe she’d left me, and I was terrified it would be forever. Lisa and I had been together for more than thirty years by now, and I couldn’t bear the thought of life without her. We had made it through so much—how could we lose each other now? I couldn’t remember a time in my life when Lisa and I weren’t side by side. And I definitely couldn’t imagine going forward without her.

Lisa didn’t go far, renting an apartment in the San Fernando Valley, about a twenty-minute drive from Rancho Bizarro. She didn’t tell anyone she’d moved out, and somehow, miraculously, we managed to keep it a secret from the tabloids and everyone else. We talked every day, and she often came out to the ranch for business. But she was absolutely determined not to come back until things had changed. She kept that apartment for a whole year, which we’ve never revealed publicly until now.

When Lisa left, I had to completely reevaluate my life. I was driving away the one person who had always stood by me, who had always loved me no matter what. I still didn’t know how to change what I was feeling, but there was one thing I could change. I stopped drinking after Lisa moved out, quitting cold turkey for the second time in my life.

The year of our separation was a period of really assessing myself, of learning how to bring myself back from the brink of despair. I was incredibly hurt that Lisa had left, but over time I began to understand that she wasn’t doing it to punish me. I began to realize that from her point of view, she’d made it for thirty years, and had gone farther with me into those dark places than most people would have been able to. And that she left only when she felt she had no other choice.

The anger and sense of betrayal I felt at first began to give
way to more productive feelings. Rather than spending each day feeling either angry or sorry for myself, I thought about how I could make things better. And how I could win Lisa back.

It was a painful time, but it also taught me all over again how to deal with pain—how I could make it work for me rather than destroy me. Very early on, I had learned how to do that with physical pain. But now I realized that the tools and techniques you use for overcoming physical pain just don’t work with emotional pain. Slowly, during this period, I learned the tools and techniques for dealing with emotional pain.

In the midst of our separation, after I’d been sober a few months, I was cast as Allan Quatermain in
King Solomon’s Mines.
This was a godsend—a starring role in one of the great heroic narratives in literary history—and it saved my ass. The original
King Solomon’s Mines
was a late-nineteenth-century novel about a band of British explorers in Africa, and it had endured as a rollicking adventure tale. I was excited to play this courageous, horse-riding hero, and thrilled to be going back to Africa—a place where both Lisa and I had found such spiritual sustenance during
Steel Dawn
.

In Africa, I was back doing the things I loved best—acting in a period piece, doing stunt work on horseback, spending time in the beauty of nature. I started exploring the African bush, learning again how to live off the land and regaining that feeling of self-worth it always brings. The weeks we spent shooting felt absolutely restorative, as if a slate was being wiped clean. I began to feel again that sense of purpose and passion that I’d lost for so long.

Lisa and I spoke by phone every day, and toward the end of the shoot, she agreed to come to Africa for a visit. I couldn’t
wait to see her, of course—but as the date drew near, I found myself scared, too. Because it had hurt so badly when she moved out, I subconsciously began protecting myself from the possibility that now she was going to leave me for good. I convinced myself that she was flying all the way to Africa to tell me she wanted a divorce, and braced myself for it.

When Lisa arrived, she felt that I was a little cold to her, and she had no idea why. I didn’t think I was being distant, but because I was waiting for her to drop the divorce bomb on me, I most likely was not myself. Ever since her response when I first asked her to marry me all those years ago, I had always feared that deep down, Lisa didn’t love me as much as I loved her. Over the decades I had gotten over that feeling, and I had learned to trust her. But when she moved out, it dredged up all those insecurities again, and feelings I had thought were long gone were now as fresh as ever. My excitement at seeing her was buried by my fear.

When a week passed and Lisa didn’t ask for a divorce, I was relieved. Maybe she was here just to be with me, after all. So I finally began to let my guard down and enjoy our time together, and when we went for a weeklong safari in Botswana after wrapping, things continued to get better. I was still scared, but as the days went by and we became more comfortable together, I began to dare to believe she might still love me, too.

Yet rifts as deep as the one we’d suffered don’t heal overnight. After we returned to California, Lisa moved back home with me, but our troubles weren’t over yet. We still weren’t really connecting with each other, and the longer that went on, the worse it seemed to get. It was as if we’d made the commitment to make it work, but didn’t have the spirit to follow through. Without the necessary nourishment, our relationship
was dying a slow death right before our eyes. We wanted to stop it, but we didn’t know how.

We ended up in a frustrating pattern: Things would be good for a while, but then we’d go right back into the bad stuff. In Bulgaria, where I was shooting
Icon,
we had the best time we’d had in a while. I said to Lisa, “I’m falling in love with you all over again,” and we started talking again about adopting children. We kept thinking we’d turned a corner, but then an argument or angry exchange would plunge us right back down.

After I finished shooting the film
Jump
in Austria, Lisa and I moved to London for seven months, where I performed in
Guys and Dolls
in the West End. During that time, the friction between us grew worse and worse, until it was almost unbearable. We bounced between anger and despair, and our relationship felt poisoned by mistrust and bitterness. After we returned to LA, we had a particularly brutal argument that made it obvious to both of us that things couldn’t continue this way.

“I feel like you’re torturing me out of this marriage,” Lisa said to me, her eyes filled with hurt.

“I feel like you’re doing the same thing to me,” I replied. We stared at each other for a moment, but there was nothing more to say.

At that point, neither of us knew how to find our way back to the other. But fortunately, we were about to get some assistance—from a very unlikely source.

George de la Peña, who had costarred in
One Last Dance
with us, had become a dear friend since we made the movie. In
2007, for my birthday, he decided to give us a consulting session with a woman he’d written a book with. Elizabeth was a well-known psychic, and George swore by her abilities.

Lisa and I weren’t big aficionados of psychic readings, but there was no harm in getting a new perspective on things. I couldn’t tell you to this day if she has psychic powers—or if anyone does, really—but the evening she came to Rancho Bizarro, she started picking up on some things very quickly. Maybe George gave her some insight before she came over, or maybe she’s just an amazing reader of people and body language. But she cut through the bullshit right away.

We walked with her through the house, showing her each of the rooms so she could get a feel for our life together. As we walked through the dance studio, she stopped short. “There’s been entirely too much crying in here,” she said. I glanced at Lisa, but she was looking down at the floor. It was true, and we both knew it. The studio, which had once been such a happy place, was permeated with sadness.

We kept walking, and when we ended up in the office in the barn, she said, “Let’s sit down right here.”

She started talking. She talked about our horses, our furniture, the feng shui of our home. And then, suddenly, she looked straight at Lisa. “There’s something really weird happening,” she said. “You’re sitting right there, but it’s like you’re not really here.”

Lisa just stared at her. “Yes. You’re here, but you’re not really,” she went on. “It’s like you’ve checked out already.” And Lisa burst into tears.

Elizabeth turned to me. “She’s already gone,” she said. “You need to really look at what she wants, at how to fix this. Because she is out the door.”

I looked at Lisa, whose face was streaked with tears. “She’s right,” Lisa said. “In my heart, I’m gone. I’m gone.”

I felt the tears well up, too. What was Lisa saying? Had I really lost her for good? Was it too late to do anything?

“What do you want, Lisa?” I asked her. “What can I do?” She sobbed quietly beside me, and my heart just about broke open. I wanted to grab her, to hold her and never let her go, but all I could do was touch her shoulder gently and look her in the eyes.

And then a strange and wonderful thing happened. We looked at each other, and somehow we each suddenly saw once again the person we’d fallen in love with. I hadn’t been able to see that for so long, since we had so many layers of pain that had built up over the years. But in that one moment, instead of seeing someone we’d fought with, or felt angry toward, or resented, all of that simply fell away. I felt a surge of love for Lisa that I hadn’t felt in years. I took her into my arms and we cried together, our tears washing away the pain that had been keeping us so far apart.

We started talking, really talking, like we hadn’t done in years. When two people are at odds, sometimes the hardest thing to do is decide who will step through the door first to try to repair things. Too often, one person is ready to go but the other isn’t. But with the help of Elizabeth, Lisa and I came together again. We both opened our hearts at the same time, reaching toward each other in a way we’d all but forgotten. And at her suggestion, we each wrote “I will forget the past” ten times on a piece of paper, then buried those papers under an avocado tree in our yard. It was time for a fresh start.

People always ask us, How do we do it? How have we kept a marriage of thirty-four years and counting so strong? I don’t
claim to have any great answers, but I do know one thing. Lisa and I never, ever stopped trying, no matter how bad things got. We never gave up on each other, although in our absolute worst moments, we came very close. If there was a way to save our relationship, we were going to find it. And the very fact that we both always wanted to save it meant that there was a way to do it. Because that desire is the key. As I said to Lisa not long after our experience with Elizabeth, just as an argument was starting to break out, “We’re stopping this right now. I never want to go back to the way it was.”

Our experience with Elizabeth was definitely life-changing. But the funny thing was, the next time we saw her after that, she got just about everything wrong—go figure. We have talked to her since then, and she amazed us once again with great insights and advice. But the only thing that really matters to us is that she helped us come together in a moment when we were both open to it. And we took it from there.