This Is Running for Your Life (14 page)

*   *   *

A few weeks into my first semester at NYU, in the fall of 2003, a letter arrived with a trio of ticket stubs enclosed. Rita had been saving them from her weekly matinees and filling each one out with longhand impressions of the according film. They ranged from a few salient words to a sentence or three, with circling, capitalization, and underlines used for emphasis, a schema that took on a precise and—to me—thrilling grammar over what turned out to be a two-and-a-half-year project.

The saving of ticket stubs like memory chips in an external drive I understood and endorsed—as a teenager, I began tucking every one of mine into a wooden box I had painted for that purpose—but the reviews struck me as inspired. I saved her stubs together with mine and asked for more. Soon I was receiving regular shipments, telegraphic bulletins from the Rainbow Cinemas—the only functioning business left in London's failing downtown Galleria—where she could catch a show for $2.50 just as she pleased. Two-fifty is what I remember movies costing when I first ventured to the same Galleria as a kid. She didn't mind going alone anymore. When she mentioned a companion on the stub, it was usually to note how gravely the dead weight or drippy attitude next door had compromised her viewing experience.

That fall I watched films all day as part of an academic regimen, with no tickets to show for them. At night I went to the movies with a man I was seeing, and indeed it was mostly him I saw. My moviegoing equilibrium was off, and the ticket stubs were a reminder of the basic mechanism of pleasure and response—movies as they are ideally watched.

The format did not confine Rita's multitudes. Her take on
Brokeback Mountain
—“Excellent portrayal of Homosexuality in the 60's. Now let the Gays
+
L. live in peace (over)
+
marry each other
+
not spoil other lives
. Great scenery”—was the first I knew of her thoughts on the subject. She saw everything—more than me, in those days—and as often as she applauded stories of gay liberation (
A Touch of Pink
: “Amusing. My companion
didn't laugh
”), the afternoon's selection ran afoul of her conservative streak. “Didn't know they were Divorce Lawyers
+
I am not comfortable with that Subject,” she wrote about Pierce Brosnan and Julianne Moore on the ticket stub for
Laws of Attraction
. “Worth $3 though.” Just six months earlier, however, in November 2003, she had been delighted by
Intolerable Cruelty
, the Coen brothers farce: “
Fun
picture about Divorce
+
Pre-Nuptual Agreements. Good.” (The $2.50 ticket price is circled.) She was similarly ambivalent about representations of violence and shady behavior. Though she was plain about the former on her
Million Dollar Baby
ticket stub (“Good Movie. I don't like Boxing or any Violence”),
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
found her in a more suggestible mood (“Black Comedy—hard for a
90 yr old
to follow but interesting. I liked it”).

Rita on
Once Upon a Time in Mexico
: “Love Johnny Depp.
¹
/
₃
Good
,
²
/
₃
Guns Guns Guns
.” She added my favorite aside of the bunch in the left corner of the stub: “?Comedy?” She radiated contempt for
Match Point
, which she found “Dreadful. Bad Person in this
Woody Allen
Movie—I left before the ending.
British
,” and seemed wearied by
Closer
, “A tale of unfaithfulness (
Don't go!
)
+
hurting each other.”

But here she is on
The Woodsman
, a film I found bleak to the point of being unbearable: “Excellent.
Study of Pedophilia
.” And then at the bottom: “
In good taste
.” Sometimes sex is all in good fun: “Made a special trip alone to see this,” she wrote on her
Sideways
stub, “Hilarious sex scenes”; “Good Research,” she wrote about
Kinsey
, “Enjoyed it!”; “Plenty of sex,” she advised, writing about
The Door in the Floor
. And sometimes, as with an ill-fated trip to
Where the Truth Lies
on a restless afternoon, it's horrifying: “I was appalled at the (over) amount of raw SEX in the movie, every which way—ménage à trois—etc—everybody left in a hurry when it was over. Don't
go
.”

I didn't go. But I did wonder how the movies help us know one another. We didn't talk much about them in person (in person there were always matinees to see), and she seemed more prepared to send the ticket stubs than discuss them. I was aware that a minor treasure was forming, one whose value would only accrue with time. During my second year at NYU I was accepted into a film-criticism seminar with Jim Hoberman, then the presiding eminence at
The Village Voice
. He challenged us to bring imagination, critical fortitude, and good writing into a fairly strict format. I made copies of a Rita Boyle ticket-stub collage one week and passed them out in class.

They were a marvel of critical economy to me then. As I lay them out now—seventy-nine in all, the last one received in April 2006—I see a puzzle made of puzzles. In trying to unlock it I have arranged and rearranged them according to chronology, enjoyment level, genre. I saw many of the films alongside her; some, such as
My Summer of Love
(“No one told me it was about two girls pushing the envelope—experimenting (over) drinking etc. I think you would enjoy it”), I still haven't seen. I wonder if she thought of me while she watched
Garden State
(“Good re:
30 year olds
”) and try to accept that she probably did. Movies are where the less overtly emotional among us spend a fair amount of time trying to figure other people out, and it's not mine to say whatever conclusions she came to about me vis à vis Zach Braff are wrong. I contemplate the times she cried watching a film I found banal (
House of Sand and Fog
), her knowing enthusiasm for unmitigated fluff (
Under the Tuscan Sun
), her openness to the “weird but clever” (
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
), the movies that slid through her mind pleasantly but without making a single impression (
Prime
), the memories stirred by stories involving what she called “my era,” like
Ray
(“
Best Picture of 2004 for me
,” she wrote, and I smile now at the authority and humility combined in those last two words, the mark of a natural critic),
Vera Drake
, and
Good Night, and Good Luck
. The shrugging off she gives to Hollywood blockbusters is hard for someone who watches them for a living to resist:
The Longest Yard
? “The longest football game—
boring
.”
Spider-Man 2
had a good story line but a “Weird Opponent. Saw it by
mistake
but
glad I did
.” Though she enjoyed the special effects in
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
, it was “Too long.
Who was the
Dozed off for
2 seconds
.” And the behemoth
Lord of the Rings
elicited her shortest shrift: “
1 hour too long
.” Ninety-year-olds have even less time to waste on computer-bay bombast than the rest of us.

The ticket that keeps filtering to the top is for
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
, which she found terrifically whimsical, another winner for her beloved “
J. Depp.
” Beyond testifying to that love (which surmounted any sin, by the way, including
The Libertine
), the tickets are most simply and consistently a record of hours spent and things felt. Together they form an impenetrable mosaic of life lived in real time; individually their concision forms a portal onto the figure of a woman alone in the dark, gazing up at the big screen's moving bodies with their illuminated skin, communing with a story to create something separate and new. An afterthought floats at the bottom of the ticket: “Wish I had a 7 yr old along.”

*   *   *

I've been telling the tale of the ticket stubs to willing listeners since it began. “What a great story,” they always say, and I agree. “You should write about it,” they add, at which point I feel compelled to fill in the rest.

*   *   *

Illness has a concentrating effect on memory, whether it sets a life into sudden relief or slides the better part of that life to a far side of the scale. “I want to remember him at his best,” we say. “Don't think of me this way,” they say. As if we might choose. And perhaps we can, to an extent; perhaps we should. But memory has its own mind. Like a soothsayer it reveals and explains our true experience of the world to us as we age, shuffling and redealing the moments of our lives into strangely proportioned patterns. The things we thought mattered—even made us who we are—recede into the background. The things we didn't even know we knew—or have denied knowing or refused to know—stubbornly present themselves for scrutiny. Memory doesn't recognize our received ideas of what's memorable—the performed or grandiose; the picture-friendly—or of whom we are at our best. It might reflect the distortions of ego, but has no ego of its own. It's one of the more startling rewards of both being human and human being.

Is it possible to defy or control—or, in the modern argot of self-maintenance,
manage
—such a process? Is it advisable? Every day we seek signs of death by another name. We call it a failure to be beautiful, to be successful, to be relevant, to be remembered, to be our best. In an anti–memento mori culture, illness is the penultimate failure, and we forget its pain of death on a kind of principle. But something would seem to be missing from an idea of what it means to live a full life that refuses to acknowledge the necessary conditions. It erodes the larger sense of what it means not just to be fulfilled but to be human, so that illness is always a source of shame, and death a complete surprise. The cult of longevity is building a paradox made of protein shakes and hormone patches: we obsess over our bodies even as we fail to imagine their decay; we extend an idea of ourselves into an ideal future without fully accepting that our bodies have to follow us there, or acknowledging the inhospitable terrain that awaits those who “win” and make it to old age. The value of the elderly extends beyond their testimony to the world as it was. We need them perhaps even more to remind us of what it is to get old, and to show us how to die. It has gone unspoken between us that, although it is painful on both sides, for many reasons the only thing worse than my seeing Rita in her deteriorated condition is not seeing her at all.

About a year before Rita fell ill, a reporting errand led me to Weill Cornell medical school. On a damp January evening I attended one of the recruiting sessions students are invited to throughout their first year, as they decide on a specialty. I was told they tend to be informal and involve student-oriented incentives like pizza and pop, which makes a pretty competitive lobbying process sound more cool and casual than it actually is. I imagined the dentistry department holding a screening of
Marathon Man
with complimentary hits of nitrous, or the surgery team unveiling a booby-trapped corpse in lieu of postmeeting snacks. But how might you sell a bunch of twenty-two-year-olds on adult-diaper duty and managing dementia?

The geriatrics department was well aware that they rank only slightly above psychiatry on the sex-appeal scale. In a bold move, the recruiting committee focused its pitch on basic human decency. Only the truly compassionate choose to be geriatricians, a sun-starved young woman informed a group of about two dozen students, which means a higher level of care and fewer assholes on the job. Yes, the pace is slower and the stakes smaller, she went on, but a rapidly aging population makes a compelling (and also compassionate) business case, with geriatrics poised at the top of a supply-and-demand cycle. What she didn't tell them is that geriatricians are currently the worst paid of all doctors, and those who opt to treat the elderly get none of the debt and tuition incentives offered to other specialties.

Most of the students were tractor-beamed directly back to their textbooks as the meeting broke up. One who lingered told me that the social element of these meetings has as much to do with specialty crunching as anything else. Geriatrics, he had decided, was good people. I looked him up recently; he went with oncology.

The elder-care boom described that night did not arrive in time for Rita. Six years later, there is one geriatrician for every two thousand Americans over the age of seventy-five. Her early appointments with a geriatric psychiatrist were months in coming, unsatisfying when they arrived, and of little consequence to her condition. She was put on antidepressants that exacerbated her somatic symptoms; an eventual medication switch only put a new name to the status quo. If it was sometimes difficult even for those of us who knew better to keep in mind that she was ill—that a lack of cognitive impairment didn't mean she was
choosing
not to care—for her doctors the source of her despair made little difference. Her condition was normal enough for a ninety-one-year-old with fewer friends by the week.

She had talked of suicide before the transplant to Halifax. The move seemed to stabilize her. In the ensuing three and a half years, the terror of those months mellowed into consuming anxiety, a restlessness that cut her phone calls short and eventually confined her to Melville. She didn't feel safe, she said, outside of her chair. Early on she had asked for help—she was desperate for relief and continued to hope we might find it for her. Over time her pleas were fewer and less forthcoming, though she was most open with my aunt. Shortly before I arrived, Rita had confessed to being a bad person. Despite doing less and less to keep herself alive, she told her youngest daughter that she was afraid to die.