Stuff That I Have Noticed #16a – Long Life

Relating to #16, Ageing. an interim (not quite a month) offering:

Nearly everyone who lives past twenty experiences the death of a loved one or at least an acquaintance. While we’re young in most cases it’s a grandparent or a teacher, someone much older than we are at the time. There are obvious exceptions to this but my point is that these are, in fact exceptions. Then finally your parents, aunts, uncles and your older siblings and cousins begin to cross the great divide. In the normal course of events – up to a point – everyone you know who dies is older that you are.

If we are blessed to have a long life there comes a point at which that begins to change. The first time I experienced the death of contemporaries I was in my forties. Within a three year period two men, directors with whom I had close working relationships having produced several shoots and traveled extensively with both, were killed by aneurysms. Ray and Andreas were within a couple of years of my age. I was saddened by their loss but their early passing prompted no soul searching or thoughts about my own mortality.

The next one I remember was an actual friend, Raul Julia. Five years my junior, he and I had been close for about fifteen years when he unexpectedly succumbed to a stroke. Raul’s death was an emotional shock. We hadn’t seen each other for a couple of years because he was traveling a lot making movies in Mexico and Australia. Before he went away on those projects we saw one another often as we worked together on a screenplay to which he was committed to playing the lead role I’d written for him.

I had finally reached the point at which my friends who were dying were my age or younger.

Ten years later it was another real friend, one of the first ones I made after migrating to New York in 1964, Jerry Orbach. Just three months younger than me, Jerry died ten years after Raul.

Author Ben Bryant after dinner with Jerry Orbach

My wife, (the Reverend) Elizabeth Hepburn, officiated at his funeral. How she got through that ceremony I’ll never know. We both loved Jerry and his loss was shocking and deeply saddening to us both. His passing was the first one I’d experienced of someone my own age. We were both sixty-nine.

From here things began to accelerate. Between Jerry’s passing and now (March 2019) as I write I have lost three very close friends all of whom were younger than me. And there have been innumerable others who died, mostly famous folks, all younger than my (now) eighty-three years.

The loss that was – and continues to be – the most painful was ten years and three months ago when the nearest person I ever had to a brother, Bob “Cobb” Collins left his pain wracked body.

Director of Photography Bob Collins

BC simply wore it out. Given the way he worked and played and indulged it was a miracle that Cobb lived to be fifty, never mind seventy-three. He had a full and rich life though. Three kids and five wives, three cinematography Emmys plus more grass than smoked by any two people I ever knew, Bob went at life pedal-to-the-metal ever since we played football together at Hollywood High and Whittier College.

On Location 2004

Together we set records as trenchermen consuming prodigious quantities of pizza, doughnuts and turkey dinners in our early days and while I backed off the excesses as I advanced in years BC kept at it. He lived life to the fullest in more ways than were good for him but he loved it all.

And thus the many blessings of a long healthy life are tempered by loss. ’Tis the price we pay.

And when we go we will no doubt leave a few senior codger friends behind.

My memoir books will be found here.