Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [174]
Eisner had been blessed with good health throughout life. At eighty-seven, he still had strength and stamina. He had decent eyesight and a steady hand—both essential to his art. He’d seen talented younger men have to abandon their work because of shaky hands, and it was sad to watch a creative mind hampered by an uncooperative body. He had the usual aches and pains associated with advancing age, but he still took his morning swim and moved about well. If he had a complaint, it was about a damaged right rotator cuff that forced him to give up his tennis game, which had been one of his passions throughout his adult life. His physician had told him that surgery would be necessary to repair the rotator cuff and allow Eisner to continue playing tennis, but Eisner declined, fearing that he wouldn’t be able to work during the lengthy recovery period. He had passed his eightieth birthday at that point.
He was feeling poorly, however, as 2004 drew to a close. He was tired and had shortness of breath, but he pushed himself to complete work on The Plot, create a new Spirit story for Michael Chabon’s Escapist comic book, make notes for and assemble a new instructional book, and conduct his usual day-to-day business. He insisted on finishing the Plot and Escapist projects before visiting his doctor. He pushed himself until, finally, he had to go to the emergency room. After an angiogram, he was informed that he had serious arterial blockage and needed quadruple bypass surgery.
The surgery, performed in mid-December, initially appeared to have gone without a hitch, but the recovery was slow. Eisner still struggled with his breathing, and after he collapsed while getting out of bed one day, his surgeon decided that another operation was necessary, this time to eliminate fluid that had built up around his heart. As before, the surgery was declared a success, and Eisner hoped to be released from the hospital sometime in early January.
What he and the hospital’s medical personnel didn’t realize was that he was bleeding internally as a result of the surgery, not from a bleeding ulcer, as a gastrointestinal doctor diagnosed. An endoscopy was scheduled for January 4.
January 3 was an eventful day. Eisner had written a highly personal introduction to The Contract with God Trilogy, a hardcover gathering of A Contract with God, A Life Force, and Dropsie Avenue: The Neighborhood, in which he wrote about how the death of his daughter had influenced his most famous graphic novel. Robert Weil, his editor at W. W. Norton, had worked on the introduction, and he called Eisner to discuss some of the edits. Weil tried to keep the conversation light, but at one point they discussed Eisner’s decision to talk about Alice in the piece.
“We discussed the autobiographical material about his daughter,” Weil remembered, “and I said I never knew the relevance of A Contract with God. He felt it would be appropriate. We spoke about the revelations about Alice, but we didn’t speak at length about the origins. I had some questions about the introduction, but he said, ‘You deal with Denis on that. Denis is great.’”
Weil was impressed by Eisner’s determination to get a clean bill of health and go back to work. “He was tired of the hospital and he was eager to get out,” Weil said. “His voice was clear and very strong. He sounded like Will.”
Later in the day, in the late afternoon, Weil called with news on another front: He’d just heard from Norton’s rights director in Spain, who told him that Grupo Editorial Norma had agreed to publish The Plot. Eisner was glad to hear this, first because he liked the Spanish publisher’s editor and enjoyed working with him, and second because Spain was one of those countries with an available edition of The Protocols. Eisner hoped that his book would refute any credence The Protocols might have in the country. As Weil remembered, it was a good conversation, cut short only when a nurse came in