Prime Time - Jane Fonda [129]
Let’s act—individually and together—to defeat ageism and apathy.
CHAPTER 20
Facing Mortality
Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.
—MURIEL SPARK
We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.
—MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
Fonda cemetery.
OKAY, SO YOU THINK THIS IS MORBID AND YOU’D JUST AS SOON not read this chapter. Try for a minute to imagine what it would be like to live forever. There’d be no shape to life anymore, no meaning. What gives a thing meaning is the tension of its opposite: Silence means nothing without sound; light means nothing without darkness; even kindness without meanness or happiness without sadness turns mundane. After a while, after we’d done everything we wanted and needed to do, then what? Keep doing the same things forever? Same old, same old. There’d be no urgency, no incentive. When time is endless, moments lose their preciousness.
It’s not just old age that we rehearse for—that I’ve been rehearsing for over the last twenty-some years. I’ve been rehearsing for my death, as well. This may strike some people as gruesome, at least at first. In the 1970s, the singer Michael Jackson came to visit me in Santa Barbara. I pointed out to him a spot at the edge of a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean where I thought I might like to be buried, and I was stunned when he freaked out, screaming, “No! No!” It was incomprehensible and frightening to him that I could so easily accept my own death. Perhaps it was a blessing that he went out the way he did. I cannot imagine him living peacefully into old age.
With my son, daughter, and stepmother, Shirlee Fonda, at the unveiling of the Henry Fonda postage stamp.
COURTESY OF THE UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE
Vanessa, Michael Jackson, me, and friends at the Michael Jackson Children’s Theatre, which he helped fund at my children’s camp.
From time to time I make an effort to imagine myself as very old. I see myself lying on a bed, frail and wrinkled. I can feel my soft little dog (alas, it probably won’t be my current dog!) curled under my arm. My children and grandchildren surround me. Most of my closest friends are younger than I am, and I see them there as well—coming and going as their lives permit. I know that what I want most is to see love in their faces. I know that I will have to live my life between now and then so as to deserve that love. I know that in order to be able to recognize their love and respond to it, I need to keep my mind alert. I know that in my dying I want to try to communicate my love for them, along with a sense of the appropriateness of death as a normal part of life. My friend Joan Halifax, a Zen priest who works with dying people, wrote that “we have an intuition that a fragment of eternity within us is liberated at the time of death.”1
Joan also told me about her father. Two days before he died, a nurse approached him and asked, “How are you feeling, Mr. Halifax?” and he replied, “Everything!” I’d like to be able to say this right before my death: I feel everything, the pure interconnectedness and interdependence of us all. I know that to do so I will need to learn to have an open, accepting, love-filled heart, and that doesn’t just happen. It takes work.
I recognize my tendency to plan everything out according to my own vision, and I know that I mustn’t cling too possessively to this death narrative, because such things usually don’t work out as we’ve imagined. Still, the awareness of it helps me to live every day more fully.
During the writing of this book, I made a movie in