Hello!

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I want to be clear, first, that to me, this isn’t such a big deal, but I said “revelation” because I know I’m in the minority on this (what else is new :o)

Quick essential background: For the past 15 years I’ve had lower back pain, but a year and a half ago my neck became a bigger issue (this follows a year after a diagnosis of stage IV follicular lymphoma in my bone marrow that was temporarily but effectively halted by six chemotherapies) and my neck’s gotten worse. I’ve had a bunch of procedures in out-patient clinics at both Cedars-Sinai and UCLA (I have another next week) and I’ve seen Lots of Doctors, Two Chiropractors, An Acupuncturist, Masseurs, and A Partridge in a Pear Tree.

Skip all the snore-inducing detail, as it’s beside the point.

I’m planning to end my life. (Yes, that was it.) Though I haven’t settled on a time frame yet.  If particular kinds of unwanted decline occur with the neck it could possibly be as soon as the end of this year, but likely not for several more years, (or until the cancer returns), or until I’m unwilling to continue integrating whatever pain level I’m at. On a 1 to 10 scale of 1 being Life Is A Precious Gift!, and 10 being Goodbye Grover’s Corners!—as I write this today, I’m at about a 7.5 - 8. (The 1 to 10 scale is invaluable to bypass relying on words, which are slippery when being used to convey meaning.)

I’ve evolved during the last two years into an understanding and acceptance that this decision suits me like an expensive custom-tailored shroud, and that the natural span of my life feels right at maybe 55 years, give or take a few in either direction. And rather than being scary, it’s become a comfort, more a relief than a sadness. But there WAS an important part of it that was really troubling me, that was making me anxious and resentful. And I couldn’t think of a way to solve that part. I knew that many people I rarely or never see, PEOPLE who love and respect me, would hear through the grapevine that “Victor D’Altorio committed suicide!”

“Suicide” is the ONLY word in our English language for the voluntary ending of one’s own life. We don’t require more than ONE WORD for it because we only have ONE WAY of thinking about it. The word suicide conjures up indelible images of a tortured, misfit teenager hanging from a rope in the garage, or an alienated husband and father, full of suppressed rage, excusing himself from the dinner table and blowing his head off with a shotgun he’d kept hidden under the sofa in the basement.  I knew a lovely sweet woman in her 60s when I was in college, who had me to Thanksgiving dinner one year. At age 20 I perceived her as gracious, intelligent, and too controlled.  She shot her head off with a revolver in her attic a year later.  When I heard the news, I heard confirmation that I had only seen her surface. 

Suicides are rash, violent, self-hating acts that almost invariably look like the giant “Fuck YOU” that they are to the people left behind.  Suicide is favored by people who keep a strangle hold on intense emotion for years, and then can’t handle the pressure they’ve put on the valve. And news of a suicide either comes Out of the Blue, or after a Cry for Help and maybe even a Failed Attempt.  Regardless, it’s a terrible, unsettling SHOCK. 

BUT, suddenly, I got this terrific, freeing, fucking idea to go PUBLIC with it. That was the obvious solution that had eluded me. I had just weeks before set up this blogsite without the slightest intention of writing about anything but Acting. But my naturally and unabashedly prone-to-self-revelation style of communication suits this confessional blog format. So now if you disapprove after hearing my personal, detailed POV, that’s ok too, because at least my departure won’t be news that came at you Out of the Blue.

Some of Those PEOPLE who love and respect me, (that I referred to earlier), are former students who’ve told me (sometimes repeatedly) that my class had been a catalyst for some type of important change of direction in their lives. So—to you artsy types (read: actors) who love me, (but certainly not excluding those others of you who love me for entirely different and equally valid reasons)—if you’ve been in my classes over the years, and you had a great, view-altering experience there, you remember me with affection and admiration and respect.  (There are plenty who don’t, I’m sure, but no need to address them, as they’re not reading this. If they are, they’ll be tickled to hear I’ll be gone soon.) 

Well, guess what? I have affection, admiration and respect for you too. 

I LOVE YOU TOO. 

I’m not writing to ask for your sympathy, or your approval. When I got this idea, I felt an instant release, a weight lifted. I’m writing to prevent you from feeling shocked, hurt, and maybe even betrayed by An Event so easily seen in A Much Too Conventional Way.  I feared your reaction would be: Oh my god, I can’t believe it! How could he do such a thing? Was everything he said in class a lie?!  I didn’t know him at all.

Nope. You knew me, and know me.  I’m the same guy.  The values I’ve been teaching in my classes for 20 years are what?  Truth (The big one). Freedom. (To embrace your own instincts and to behave (onstage and off) in accordance with the freedom they can provide and its boundaries.) A Disregard for Politeness and Conventional Behavior (pretense).

Why am I ready to move on?  Is the pain that bad?  Well, bad enough that I can honestly say it sucks dead moose cock. But in perspective with The Vast Array of Human Suffering, my gosh it’s not even a blip on the radar. But life is always a trade-off.  If you have this, then you can’t have that.  If you stay with the adoring guy who’s an emotional zero Charlotte, then you don’t have to experience an orgasm, or your terror of being unloved, or alone. If you keep playing that badly-written role on that wildly popular TV show Mike, your soul will shrink, but you can have 3 houses and beautiful women fucking you 24/7. Everything comes with a price, with an upside and a downside, and there’s always a choice to be made. So, in my case, the physical pain sits on one side of the scale, and “life’s pleasures” sit on the other.

There IS a downside to unconditionally loving parents btw. They prepare you for a world that doesn’t exist. Which also has an upside and a downside. (See drawings of Martin Escher.)

The Avenues That Remain Open to me (some personal, some professional) are of no interest any longer as they’ve been duly and fully explored. And The Avenues Of Some Remaining Genuine Interest (some personal, some professional) are closed.  These are truths to be accepted. Magical Thinking in the Face of Reality doesn’t work for me. If you have a fantasy at age 50 that you’re going to become A Movie Star or A Rock Star or The President of the United States, that’s actually a lovely, wonderful thing (no sarcasm) as long as you’re still enjoying auditioning, or singing in bars, or running for office. My discarded fantasy?  The artistic directorship of A Small but Moneyed Regional Theatre.  In spite of all the Cheap Sentiment in the cliché that “There’s just nothing to come close to the thrill of great, live theatre” I still feel it. It was my first and deepest love. But at this point, I might as well be dreaming about a ride on a flying Unicorn.

For at least six months or so I’ve discussed my thoughts about My Life As My Own with my two sisters, who are unconditionally loving, (as my parents were—more about them later if you like acute suffering-before-death stories), and also with some friends, and several doctors (easily the freakiest part).

Of course, as people tend to do, these Responders fall into TWO distinct categories when they hear a POV which is painful or difficult to understand and accept.  BOTH types respond in a way that’s part of a larger, familiar pattern. The way someone deals with an uncomfortable truth is about them, about who they are, it has nothing whatever to do with the particular uncomfortable truth.

The First Group goes into denial.  They’re not in the least impressed with what I consider to be the thoughtful Authenticity of My View.  Some characteristic responses: “You don’t mean that” OR “You’re just depressed, it’s a phase” OR “I don’t want to hear that kind of talk”(a big one) OR “Have you thought about taking a pottery class?” (You can substitute any activity you imagine I may have overlooked in my quest for meaning [Origami, Snorkeling, Anti-Depressants, Collecting Salt & Pepper Shakers] that would suddenly reverse my instincts and before I knew it, I’d be blowing out 80 candles on a cake wondering Where did the time go?!) 

So this first group handles what’s difficult, to some degree, by staying on the Surface (and degree is the key, or, as the politicians are fond of saying, “the Devil is in the details”). In extreme cases, these people pretend that the thought or event causing the pain isn’t really taking place at all.  This group pays a really high price for the patterned avoidance in their lives, missing opportunities to grow and change, sometimes realizing they’ve been in denial much later on, sometimes never seeing it at all, depending on how much unexamined fear they have of the related facts.

The second type LISTENS. Even if they feel frightened, sad, confused, angry etc. they listen.  They may express back how they feel, or they may choose to keep it to themselves, but they’re more interested in HEARING than Judging, Labeling, or trying To Fix, Persuade, or Convince.  (There’s nothing really wrong with the latter btw if it comes from love, and as long as it follows listening.  If it precedes listening though, or if it’s a substitute for listening, that’s a problem that usually comes back to bite em in the ass later on.)

My amazing friend and roommate Ann Marie started out as the first type, and has evolved, slowly, into someone who is now much closer to the second, I’m proud to say, partly as a result of terrific discussions of these issues for hours on end between us over the last several years.  Her transformation was a difficult struggle, having been raised by parents who hadn’t the slightest concept of personal autonomy. She is (in her own words) very grateful to have evolved out of her old way of seeing.  Her love and support of me has been a gift in my life. (She insists I add that the same is true for her.)

Living in THIS body that I’ve loved living in for the last 25 years (the first 25 were spent in the closet, not in my body) is no fun at all anymore.  Are there other people on this small planet we call The Earth living with much, much worse?  Oh MY GOD YES. Clearly any POV is rooted in expectation: What we’ve become accustomed to, What we may never have had to begin with, and What we’re willing (or not) to do without. 

There are A Lot of People who are just plain Afraid to Die, or afraid that ending their lives will carry the same punishment as if they had gone on a killing spree at the Mall. I asked a woman in the waiting room of the Pain Clinic at UCLA if she had ever considered suicide, (hadn’t said anything about me) and she said, “Oh, yes, many times” but that she couldn’t do it because it was against her religion, and then eyed me with pity and a bit of suspicion, adding that she had “heard that if you kill yourself you’re doomed to keep coming back as lower and lower creatures.” Fear of Hell can be a powerful reason to get up each morning.

It was absolutely the reason my 87 year old father struggled onward for years in the face of bad, constant back and neck pain and congestive heart failure (which is what killed him. The back pain never would have. FYI, I moved back to Ohio in 2002 for 4 years to take care of him and prevent the nursing home ending.) If I had a nickel for every time he said to me, in bad pain, “Oh Victor, I just want to die” I’d have about ten dollars. One day, wondering if he actually meant it, I replied, as you would to a small child that you don’t want to frighten, “Dad, you can die whenever you want if you’re really done. All you have to do is stop taking the 15 medications that are keeping your body alive WAY past the point where it’s capable of sustaining itself on its own, and you will die. I can make sure we get good pain meds for you so that you won’t suffer while your body is shutting down.”  His pleading reply: “Oh Victor, I can’t commit suicide.” 

What could I say?  To see that as suicide was TRULY A Trip Through The Looking Glass for me into a world of complete and utter absurdity also know as The World We All Live In Everyday In America.  Just because forcing our bodies to keep living far beyond what’s natural happens to be the PARADIGM for Dying in this Country, that doesn’t make it any less twisted.  Our health care system is collapsing partly under the weight of keeping alive the barely alive.  Dad was raised, of course, strict Catholic (read: Ritualized Insanity) and was terrified to die.  This isn’t me extrapolating btw, he told me this many times.  He believed that at his death he would be judged by a God who would punish him rigorously for his unforgivable sins, which he would not reveal to me. And certainly not for my lack of prodding him. Sins of Infidelity, I guess. What else could the guy have done? He ended up spending the last year and a half of his life in a nursing home anyway because he was so fragile he needed 24 hour care.

My mother died under very different circumstances.  Circumstances which made my father’s look like a stroll through the park on a summer day. Her body was pretty much healthy until the very end, but she fell victim to extreme short-term memory loss and a crippling anxiety that resulted from an almost constant, innate awareness of what was actually happening to her.  This process took about six or seven years, got bad about halfway through, and the last two years of her life were like something out of Edgar Alan Poe.  Trapped in the best nursing facility we could afford for her that was crammed with some of the most heartbreaking human beings I’d ever seen, she descended slowly into an existential, Alzheimer-ish anguish that you wouldn’t wish on your worst fucking enemy.

The woman accepted my homosexuality (as did my dad) as if it were a gift from the fates designed to teach her to understand things about human experience she could not otherwise have learned.  At age 26, when I brought home for Christmas my first love, my mother insisted that he and I sleep together in my parent’s bed (which was king-sized) and she and my dad spent those two nights sharing the double bed that had been mine as a kid. “Oh, that bed isn’t big enough for two grown men!” The night we arrived, we sat in the living room stuffed with her Italian Holiday Dinner for Company. Kevin and I were on the couch, maybe two feet of space between us, while we chatted with my parents.  Early on my mother said “Sit closer together you two, put your arms around each other, I want to see you act like you do in your own home, you’re in love.”  Kevin started to cry.  He couldn’t believe it, as his parents were like most: blind. My mother shattered his paradigm for “mother”.  How did a little Italian woman, raised Catholic in the 1920s and 30s manage to actually SEE us?  She was a cool chick.

The night before she had to leave her home of 40 years because it was simply not safe for her to be there any more, I was absolutely wracked with guilt because I wasn’t willing to go into her bedroom and end her life in some painless way. It should have been easy to do with drugs. We put animals to sleep painlessly. And she wanted that, as she told me so many times over the years, not joking in the least, to please put her out of her misery if anything like that kind of fate befell her.  In the end, I chickened out even though I knew that it was not only the right thing to do, but a way of repaying the unconditional love she had always shown me on instinct.  I chose, selfishly, and absolutely out of fear, not to risk going to jail for murder, which could easily have happened, especially in Ohio.  I felt RAGE at a system that prevented me from sparing my mother this obscene, horrific loss of her sanity and her dignity. Rage.

And here’s another thing.  What is it about longevity that we prize so highly? I don’t see dying voluntarily at 55 as any sadder or less fortunate than dying in a nursing home at 80. In fact I see it as more fortunate. So I’m not feeling sorry for myself in this.  I actually feel like a bit of a maverick, as much as I hate to have to use that word. I’ve always been a Quality-not-Quantity kind of guy (except with doughnuts).  Scott, my sweetie-pie number three and partner for six years, was an amazing man: beautiful, sexy, much smarter than I, articulate, funny, opinionated (to put it mildly) and also the most truly even-tempered person I’ve ever known.  He challenged me in every way, tickled me, captured my heart, made me rock hard, and when he died in 1996, he left me a better guy for having spent those six years with him.  I knew he was going to die when I met him. I had no idea if that would take 5 years or 20, but he was the point. Did we have to go on for decades to be a good thing?  It was an amazing six years. Think of all the people who stay together because they’re too frightened to part, or care too much about what other people will think, who don’t make each other happy any more (maybe never did), but they’ve bought the “forever” farm. 

In our culture you can’t really say “I love you” and expect to be taken seriously.  You have to say “I love you AND I will continue to love you FOREVER”. How on earth do you know that?  What a dumb, short-sighted thing to promise. Things happen, growth happens, people change. I think that’s a good thing, even if they part. Growth is not nearly as highly prized in America as longevity.

I don’t have to make The CHOICE to have the last third of my life be all about hospitals and the pain of disintegration, which is where I’m headed, (faster than some, slower than others of course). I can choose my own path, as I always have. (When you wanted to do something because your friends were doing it, didn’t your mother ask “If they all jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?” [Mothers learned these lines at a School for Mothers they all attended.] Well, for me, Jumping Off The Bridge equals Losing Control Of Your Life and ending up with No Quality Of Life At All in an endless loop called Our Healthcare System, and then perhaps in a nursing home. Elvira (do you love that name? I couldn’t make that up) should be proud that just because everybody else is doing it, I’m not jumping.)

I prefer to accept my desire to get on to whatever fate has in store for us next.  For better or worse, we’re all headed there, and procrastination has never been a comfort for me. Quite the opposite. I’ve never done my best work under pressure of a deadline.  In college, I was fast asleep at midnight the night before the paper was due, having finished it days earlier. My roommate, like almost everyone else, was typing into the wee hours.  I can procrastinate if something’s optional, but if I have to do something, I’ve never found comfort in putting it off.

I hope you can hear both the consistency and the authenticity of my POV. I’ve lived my life for me. I’ve had wonderful, close years of intimacy with four different amazing men (three are gone, the first is still my dearest friend), and some other shorter, but in some ways, equally terrific times with maybe four or five others who were great, loving guys.  I’ve acted and directed and taught classes in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, and enjoyed most of it enormously (though I won’t pass up the opportunity to say that the greatest exception was being directed by, in Hamlet for god’s sake, the truly talent-FREE Charles Fee.) If you were ever in my class, you certainly remember me gleefully expressing my opinions (just like here) and encouraging you to do the same, and then to go farther. I loved teaching and I think it always showed (though currently I’m not missing it).  So don’t cry for me Argentina.  My departure of choice isn’t a tragedy in the least.  I look back on my life with no regrets about any of the choices I made.  Of course I had goals that I wasn’t able to achieve, (who doesn’t other than Barak Obama?) but that’s OK, I’m a person, not a crowned prince, I don’t have to have everything I want.  And it’s easy to be ok about it because I’ve had SO much.  I have no regrets about what I should have tried, and missed.  I just can’t think of a thing.

FYI, When I experimented with LSD in the 80s I had some spectacular, unforgettable visions.  I remember riding my bicycle fast, in city traffic, shirtless on a sweltering hot day in Chicago, sweating, testosterone pumping, Hyper Aware (Heaven for me) of the finely tuned workings of both machines at maximum power, tripping my brains out and having the time of my life.  No, certainly not everybody’s cup of tea, but for me it was a real highlight. A flagrant flight of reckless youth and an experience absolutely off the charts for sheer exhilaration and defiance of death. I also had sex on acid with my second squeeze, Mark, a math professor at University of Chicago, who looked like the cliché of an academic or librarian (but with a much sexier body which he dressed in the ugliest clothes I had ever seen on an adult male homo, and which I loved.). If you took off his glasses though, his inner beast was released, and all bets were off. At the time we were passionately in love so the sex was already A+. But on LSD—well, the only way I can explain is this: from the time it takes effect, every square inch of skin on your body feels like the skin on (for girls) your unbearably engorged clitoris just prior to “The Big O”, OR, (for boys) the head of your throbbing cock a few seconds before you squirt it off. (It’s not my intention here to recommend the drug, just to share a fond recollection.)

Ultimately your reactions are about you. (Sorry to get all Deepack on you but it’s true.) I don’t mean that flippantly or as a challenge.  I, of course want you to be happy for me, to feel happy that I won’t have to face years of pain.  Rather than burden your heart, I want you to help me celebrate my choice with a fresh look at an old standby. A good analogy would be how you might feel for a close co-worker who took a much better job in Europe. You’d miss him but Hey, good for him! He’s off to something better!

You see why this is about YOU.  What we imagine After Death is such a private tunnel for each of us, having been raised in a culture that lives in Denial of It.  Religion, Superstition, Fear of the Unknown, Hollywood Movies, Old Wives Tales and the like. It’s a kooky, sticky, thorny jumble of fears.

I don’t fear it.  I don’t know why, I just don’t.  There ARE things I fear, (living in pain, the effects of Denial, Republicans), but death? not so much. If THE VOID is coming, that’s fine with me. NOTHING-ness sounds like a Heaven too good to be true. On the other hand, if the judgment of a vengeful god is coming, I’m completely fucked, but so are all of you.  And if a merciful god awaits, we’ll all be forgiven for everything, isn’t that what mercy is? My personal instinct about “what comes after” is consistent with my belief that God As Creator is myth. I wonder if maybe the energy in our bodies (spirit, if you prefer that word), may continue on in some form once the body dies. I imagine the memory of one’s Human Identity is gone in almost all cases, so the energy, finally freed of the flesh, becomes part of a larger pool? Maybe? (I’m not putting any money on it, it’s just an idea if I’m forced to speculate. On the 1 to 10 CERTAINTY Scale, I’m at a 2 on this.)

But beware the notion of a god with human-style boundaries for forgiveness.  To me that god has surely been created by people who need Him to resemble THEM (it’s always a man of course, unless a 70s-style feminist is using humor to make a political point).  How will He judge the various cases before him? Will the girl who threw her baby into a dumpster on prom night be forgiven?  Will the circumstances that led her to it matter to Him at all, or will He stick to a firm NO dumpster/NO Heaven rule? Will Jeffrey Dahmer (evil incarnate, I think we can all agree) be forgiven?  Certainly God, of all people (!) should understand that that pitiful, twisted, bloodthirsty creature was absolutely compelled to cut the heads off living things. He started doing it when he was, like, four. Certainly GOD would understand that, and punish the demon that compelled him, rather than the unfortunate man possessed.  Or is that just too sensible an image of a merciful god?

Congratulations on making it to The End, and THANKS for listening.