We listened to classical records and told stories and took turns cooking dinner. When 6 o’clock rolled around, my grandfather would ask, “Who’s pouring me a Scotch?” Cocktails, cheese, olives and stale water crackers appeared. I floated in the sacred waters of my childhood - the swimming pool - and harvested lemons from the prolific backyard tree. My grandfather couldn’t stand the air-conditioning, so we wore bathing suits most of the day and paged languidly through withered photo albums. What ensued was a five-day tropical vacation. ![]() They’d smile and recite the opening lines: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/A stately pleasure-dome decree:/Where Alph, the sacred river, ran/Through caverns measureless to man/Down to a sunless sea.” I found it in an English poetry collection of my grandfather’s and read sitting on a sagging couch, intermittently distracted by family members who, one by one, came in and asked what I was doing. I was a college junior at the time, required to read Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” for class that week. On an unseasonably warm Los Angeles day in May 2011, a cast of characters - his children, grandchildren and friends - assembled at his home, ready to play their part in the last act of his life. In a recent report, The Lancet Commission on the Value of Death notes that today death “is not so much denied but invisible.” At the end of life, people are often alone, shut away in nursing homes or intensive-care units, insulating most of us from the sounds, smells and look of mortality. It’s also a reality that doctors, patients and families tend to avoid. For a brief moment, at my grandfather’s party, I got to slow down the inevitable, to be with the people I grew up with, in the place we held sacred and dear.ĭeath is, famously, one of the few certainties in this life. Tubes followed him up and down the corridor. No longer able to walk from his bedroom to the kitchen without stopping to catch his breath, he rigged up an oxygen tank that allowed him to roam the length of his home. But at 97 years old, he had flagging energy. He lived with emphysema for decades, maintaining his last sliver of healthy lung tissue through a combination of lap swimming, walking, Scotch and luck. Like so many in his generation, he was a multipack-a-day smoker a Philip Morris cigarette hangs from his lower lip in nearly every photograph I have of him. What he liked was the process of making a show: reworking the script, setting the angles, being in charge. ![]() Even then he mostly used it to watch Dodgers games. He moved to California in 1935 to work in Hollywood, becoming a director for B-list movies and TV shows like “77 Sunset Strip” and “The Mickey Mouse Club.” Despite his work, he didn’t particularly care for film and didn’t own a TV until 1964.
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