Host: Catherine

Catherine: [00:00:00] Happy New Year, y’all. For lots of people, the New Year’s soundtrack includes the famous song with a haunting line, “Should old acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind.” I love that stories are such a great way of honoring and remembering the people we’ve lost touch with or lost altogether. Through stories, I’ve been introduced to a lot of remarkable people who I never got to meet in person. 

People live on through the stories their loved ones tell about them. They’re brought back to life, if only for a moment. I recently got to know someone remarkable when her partner, Elizabeth Gilbert, took them off stage to tell a story. Elizabeth told this just a few weeks ago at an evening we called First Light. This was our annual show for Moth members, which took place at the gorgeous St. Ann’s Church in Brooklyn Heights. Here’s Elizabeth Gilbert, live at The Moth.

Elizabeth: [00:00:52] Last summer, I was walking down the street in New York City in the East Village. It was a glorious day and the sun was bright and I had the love of my life on my arm and she was dying. Really dying. She had advanced pancreatic and liver cancer, and the tumors had grown and they had spread. She had recently discontinued all chemo and medical treatment, because it was hopeless. All she wanted at this point in her life was to try to find small ways to enjoy whatever was remaining to her. And what that meant on this day was that she wanted to try to mobilize, to get herself out of the house and walk Tompkins Square Park and get a soft-serve ice cream cone.

Now, Tompkins Square Park was four blocks from where we lived, but it truly might as well have been Kilimanjaro for the amount of effort that it took her to do it on this day. She was on her cane and she’s leaning her full weight against me, what’s left of her full weight, because she’s gotten so thin. I’ve got my arm around her and I can feel her little bones through her sweater and my heart is breaking, because this day signifies a turning point in her illness that I had known was coming and I had dreaded was coming and now it is here. It is the day where she has now gotten so frail and so weak that we can officially say that this once-formidable person is now completely dependent on me.

And the reason that’s so particularly heartbreaking-- It would be heartbreaking for anybody, but the reason it was so painful in this case is what you got to know about my girl, is that for the 17 years that I knew Raya Elias, I never once saw that woman walk into a room that she was not the most powerful person in that space. Never once. Didn’t matter what she was so tough, so strong, so hard. She was a Syrian-born, Detroit-raised, glamorous butch lesbian, punk-rock, ex-heroin addict, ex-felon, rock-and-roll music star, artist, filmmaker, hairdresser, writer, phenomenon of a human being. And in the circles that we rolled in, Raya was legend. Not just because she was so tough and so street-smart, but also because she had this enormous, capacious, generous heart and she was ferociously protective of anybody who she cared about.

If you were lucky enough to be one of the people who Raya loved, she would just tuck you under her arm and name you as one of her little cubbies. Like, we’re all the little wolf cubs and she was the mama wolf, and she would just take you through the world and you were never in danger when Raya was there. I have never experienced a feeling like it. And that’s exactly why I fell in love with her and why I blew up my entire life, to be with her was precisely and expressly because of that power. But now, she’s powerless. 

As we’re inching along the sidewalk on Avenue A, I’m feeling that for the first time and I’m feeling how the tables have turned, because now I’ve got her tucked under my arm. And now it’s my job to protect her from a world that she used to dominate effortlessly. I don’t know if you’ve taken care of somebody who’s sick and dying, but when somebody who you love is very fragile, one of the things that happens is the entire world starts to feel incredibly perilous. Every crack on the sidewalk is something that could trip her and she could hurt herself. Every kid on a skateboard, every big dog could knock her over. So, it’s my job to keep her safe and I’ve got her bundled up and I’m navigating her down this world. 

It’s so terrible to watch her decline. But the one consoling thought that I’m having in that moment is, “Thank God, she has me.” Like, “Thank God, or what would we do? Like, who would protect her if I wasn’t here?” At that moment, this super-sketchy guy on a bicycle comes tear-assing up the sidewalk super-fast. He’s like this gross, meth-head–looking, crusty, bearded, nasty guy, and he’s got a furious face and he’s tearing so fast up the sidewalk, careening into pedestrians and he’s coming right at us, and he almost plows us over. 

I managed just at the last minute to grab Raya and pull her out of the way for safety. But he clips her. He hits her on the arm with his bike handlebar as he goes by. And I’m like, “Oh, my God, my baby,” at which point Raya turns on her heels and says, “Get the fuck off the fucking sidewalk, motherfucker.” [audience laughter] And the guy [chuckles] screeches to a halt, drops his bike, grabs his crotch and goes, “Suck my dick, bitch.” And Raya goes, “If you had a dick, you’d be driving a car, not a bicycle, you fucking loser.” [audience laughter] And I’m like, “Whoa, [audience chuckles] kids, I’m from Connecticut, [audience chuckles] and I need everybody to just take it down a notch.” 

But I’m also looking at her and I’m thinking, what are you literally backing this up with? Like, she weighs 87 and a half pounds at this point. And I’m thinking, what are you going to do, Raya, if this guy comes at you and then I see it, that he’s not going to come at her. Because she’s locked eyes with him, and she has communicated to him very clearly that she is the alpha and he is the mutt. And everybody can see it. Him most of all. He drops his eyes, grabs his bike and scuttles off. And Raya keeps on inching down the sidewalk with her cane, gets her soft serve, finds herself a nice little sunny spot in the park, smiles up at me and says, “Today’s a good day, babe.” [audience chuckles] 

So, yeah, this story that I had in my head when Raya got sick about how helpless and dependent she was going to become, that never actually happened. Because somehow, despite the advances of the disease, Raya managed to remain the apex predator in every situation [audience chuckles] that she came into and every plan that I had made. Because I made plans to take care of her. Every plan I made based on my perceived idea of her helplessness, that all blew up too. 

And my whole planning had been based on this idea that I was powerless to stop her from dying. But by God, I was going to make sure that she had the gentlest, the safest, the most Zen, the most enlightened, the most cushioned death that a human being could possibly have. But she didn’t want any of that that I was providing, as it turned out, because she didn’t want gentle. That’s not how she rolled. So, she didn’t want to talk [chuckles] to the bereavement counselor that I brought to her house. She wanted to watch football that afternoon with her nephews. I made her all this beautiful organic food to keep her as healthy as we could keep her. And she didn’t want it. She wanted to live on Oreos and cigarettes, and did live almost exclusively on Oreos and cigarettes for [audience chuckles] a solid year past her original expiration date, as she called it.

And of course, I got her signed up with hospice, because I wanted to make sure that she had the best and safest quality home care. And then, Raya got kicked out of hospice, because she wouldn’t let the nurses in when they came to check on her. So, they’d come for their weekly check-ins and she’d send them away. She didn’t want to deal with them or look at their faces, didn’t want to deal, so hospice threw her out, which causes me to beg of you and of the universe: who the hell gets kicked out of hospice? [audience chuckles] Like, how is that a thing? But that’s what happened. 

I went through all this trouble to rent and create this beautiful apartment for her to spend her last months in with everything that I could imagine that she could possibly need. A doorman, building and an elevator, and wide hallways for the inevitable wheelchair that would be coming and an extra room for a caregiver if we needed a night nurse toward the end, everything that you could possibly imagine: this building, beautiful, soft, sunny space. And then, two months before she died, Raya decided that she didn’t want to be in New York, that she wanted to move to Detroit. She wanted to go back home to be with her family and to party with her friends from 30 years ago, so she moved. My fragile, terminal cancer patient moved to another city. And what did I do? I did what I’d always done with Raya, I followed.

I scampered after her like the little cub that I had always been and blew up my life once again just to try to keep up with the she-wolf. So, even Raya, not even Raya, tough as she is, of course, was tough enough to withstand pancreatic cancer. And the disease continued to eat at her and by November of last year, the doctor said, “It’s any time now. She’s on borrowed time already, but it could be at any moment.” And knowing that she was so close to the end, Raya called in her ex-wife, Gigi, who she’d been married to 10 years earlier and asked her to come and help take care of her. She had also already called in her ex-girlfriend, Stacy, from 20 years ago and she had me. [audience chuckles]

So, now what Raya’s got is a hot blonde from every decade of her life, [audience laughter] waiting on her hand and foot with devotional love, which is Raya Elias’s version, of course, of hospice. [audience laughter] And that totally worked for her, the Charlie’s Angels way of being taken care of. And we did it. We did it, because we’re crazy about her, because she was that mack-daddy, and she still was. She managed to live till Christmas. I don’t know how, but she pulled it off. It was important to her. And on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, she couldn’t get off the couch and she was in and out of awareness, but she knew that we were there and she knew that we were loving on her and she was happy. And at midnight on Christmas night, we put her to sleep.

At 4 o’clock in the morning, I had to wake her up to give her pain medication and I couldn’t rouse her. This was the first time that had ever happened. So, I just lay with her for an hour and waited for another hour. I tried again, couldn’t get any response from her. Another hour, no response. And by the time the light of dawn was breaking through the snowstorm outside, I could hear that her breathing was ragged and her lips and her hands were turning blue, and I knew that’s it. So, I went and I got Stacy and Gigi and I said, “It’s now, you know? Come.” 

What happened next was so exquisite. It was so beautiful. It was like the three of us, these three women who had loved her so passionately for her whole life, we just knew what to do, like it had been scripted or that we were born to it. We just came into the bedroom, and Gigi put on sacred music, and Stacy lit a candle, and then the three of us, as one, got in the bed and we wrapped our bodies around her body and we took turns telling her all the last things that she needed to know, if she could still hear us that we loved her, that she was incredible, what a grand and stellar life that she had lived, that we would never be the same for having loved her and been loved by her, that she had forged our hearts in the furnace of her power, that we would always love her and that we would never stop telling the world her name. 

And then it was like this silence descended, and it was like this portal opened from some distant, uncharted part of the universe and this river of the infinite entered into that space. And we could feel it, that it was taking her very gently from us. And that’s when Raya opened her eyes and said, “What the fuck are you guys doing?” [audience laughter] And we’re like, “Nothing. [chuckles] [audience laughter] Nothing.” She’s like, “What’s going on?” I’m like, “Definitely not a--" “That’s my death watch.” Like, “No, that’s not--” We’re wiping sheets of tears from our eyes. She goes, “Babe, why are Stacey and Gigi in our bed?” I’m like, “They’re not. They’re just dropping off some mail, you know,” kicking them out of bed. Gigi’s running to turn off the music.

Raya’s like, “Why does it smell like a fucking candle in here?” Stacey’s like, “It doesn’t. My shampoo.” And Raya’s like, “You guys are weird.” She sits up in bed, lights a cigarette, looks at me and goes, “Babe, what’s today’s date?” I said, “It’s December 26th, my love.” She said, “Cool. I want to hit that 60 percent off sale today at Lululemon.” [audience laughter] So, that’s what we did. A couple hours later, we’re all at Lululemon. There’s Raya in the dressing room, surrounded by her attendants, trying on athleisure wear [audience laughter] for some future that she’s still very much intending to have. 

Somebody once told me, and I wish to God that I had got it sooner, that there is no such thing as a dying person. There are living people and there are dead people. And as long as somebody is alive, as long as they have any sentience or sense about them, you have to expect and allow them to be who they have always been. Never more important than at the end of somebody’s life that they get to be who they are and who they always were. And I think that goes a long way toward explaining why Raya was so resistant, why she was so stubbornly oppositional to every story that I had in my mind about what her death might be or should be. She just wasn’t having it. 

From the beginning of her diagnosis till the end of her life, she was like, “I’m not your story, whore. Like, you don’t get to script this. I’m Raya Fucking Elias. My life, my death. I’m doing it my way. You don’t write this one. I’m doing this one.” So, it was just a handful of days after Christmas when she did die. And hers was not a gentle death, I’m sure you will be shocked to hear. She went down fighting. And it was rough. And even there at the end, I still had stories in my head about what I wanted it to be and how I wanted it to go. I had this very airy, dreamy, romantic idea about what Raya’s last words would be to me, that she would gaze up at me from a soft pillow and say, “I love you” or “Thank you for everything you did for me.” [audience laughter] You’re getting the idea. [audience laughter] 

Raya Elias’s last words to me were, “No, baby, no.” As I was trying to walk her from the bathroom to what would be her deathbed, “No, baby, no.” It was the last steps that she was ever going to take in her remarkable life, “No, baby, no.” Her legs didn’t even work anymore, “No, baby, no. I got this.” And what I got, but I only got it at the very end, was that Raya didn’t want my help. She didn’t want my pity, she didn’t want my planning, she certainly didn’t want my story. The only thing that Raya wanted from me was that thing which I had always so effortlessly and naturally given her, which was my devotion and my awe. 

She just wanted me there in the room, in love with her and bearing witness as she took that last ride. She just wanted me standing back in amazement and horror, but mostly amazement, watching as she went down, as she came out of this earth, not gently, but like a ship going down in a storm at sea, like the force of nature that she was. And in the end, the only thing that I could do for her in those last harrowing hours was nothing, was nothing except to surrender to my powerlessness and to have to let her go and to have to watch her go. And she went down swinging and battling to the last awful breath. And it was brutal and it was beautiful and she was brave. I howled like a wolf when she was gone, [sobs] and I will never stop telling the world her name. 

[cheers and applause] 

Moderator: [00:17:22] Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, Elizabeth Gilbert.

Catherine: [00:17:27] Elizabeth Gilbert was raised on the Gilbert Family Christmas Tree Farm in Connecticut, but she currently lives in New York City. She’s the bestselling author of eight books of fiction and nonfiction, including Eat, Pray, Love, The Signature of All Things, and Big Magic (deluxe): Creative Living Beyond Fear. She’s been a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her new novel, City of Girls, will be published in June. This podcast is being released on January 4th, 2019, which marks the one-year anniversary of Raya’s death. 

That’s all for this week. We hope you’ll join us next time. Podcast production by Emily Couch, Viki Merrick, and Paul Ruest. The Moth Podcast is presented by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public at prx.org.