FOREVER REMEMBERED
Remember me with smiles and laughter,
for that is how I will remember you all.
If you can only remember me with tears,
then don't remember me at all.
The following are extracts from articles.
Associated Press (July 2
1991)
Actor Michael Landon, who died yesterday at age 54 after battling cancer, was remembered by his friends and colleagues as a man of warmth, loyalty and unusual courage. “He was a rare individual who was as inspiring and heroic in real life as were the characters that he played on film,” said Jeff Sagansky, head of CBS Entertainment. Ex-President Reagan, a former actor, and his wife, Nancy, said in a statement: “His tragic battle with cancer touched the hearts of every American, as did his undeniable spirit.” Johnny Carson, whose son Richard was killed last week in a car accident, said yesterday: “This has been a devastating week for me and my family. Michael called last Monday expressing his deepest sympathy on the death of my son Ricky. The courage and sensitivity he showed in our conversation, in comforting me while he was in great pain, attests to the quality of this man and his character.” Sagansky said “when I called him, when I first heard that he was ill, the first thing he wanted to know was to make sure that I was OK. He inspired that kind of loyalty. When he believes in you, he believes in you forever. Everything he did came from the heart,” Sagansky said. Actress Melissa Sue Anderson, who played Mary Ingalls on Little House on the Prairie said, “I was 11 when I first met him and those years were difficult for me and he was wonderful. He treated me almost like a daughter,” Anderson said. “He taught me a lot about his philosophy of what work meant. He was always working because he had so much fun doing it.”
Associated Press (July 6 1991)
Eulogies at Michael Landon’s Funeral.
Actor Michael Landon was
eulogized as a man of integrity and humor yesterday as family members and
co-stars of his 'Little House on the Prairie' television series attended a
private funeral service. Former President Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy,
were among 500 mourners at a noon ceremony at Hillside Memorial Park and
Mortuary. “I know that Dad wants us to think of him and be filled with love
and happiness and laughter,” said Landon’s daughter, Leslie Landon Matthews.
She read a poem her father wrote for an episode of 'Little House.' “Remember
me with smiles and laughter, for that is how I will remember you all,” she
read. “If you can only remember me with tears, then don’t remember me at
all.” The 54-year-old actor, familiar to a generation of television viewers as
Little Joe on the long-running 'Bonanza' series, died Monday of liver and
pancreatic cancer at his Malibu ranch. His body was cremated a day later. His
ashes will be interred at Hillside, which also houses the remains of Lorne
Greene, who played Ben Cartwright on 'Bonanza.' The funeral service was heavily
guarded. At the glass and stucco chapel, a dozen guards and sheriff’s deputies
saw to it that only those on a guest list were admitted. But paparazzi lined a
hillside behind the chapel, and the roaring of news helicopters overhead
sometimes drowned out the eulogy. Landon’s 'Little House' co-stars praised him
for his honesty and wit. “Michael’s heart was full of love. He was loved by
everybody,” said Melissa Gilbert-Brinkman, who played his daughter. “After
the death of my own father, in my eyes, he became my father. He was so
special and so basically good. With him, you always knew exactly where you
stood. The man had integrity.” Co-star Merlin Olsen said he was often asked
what Landon was like. “What you saw was what you got’” Olsen said. “He
was a genuine and loving human being, about as fine a boss as you could ever
have. He told me what he wanted me to do, and more importantly, actually
listened to me.” The Reagans, who sat at the front of the chapel, were such
fans of 'Little House' that they sometimes called Landon after an episode they
liked. Jay Eller, his friend and attorney, recalled how Landon was asked what he
would do if, because of chemotherapy, he lost the long, curly hair he cherished.
The attorney said Landon replied: “I’m rich. I’ll buy a hat.” Eller also
read a statement from Landon’s friend, actor Eli Wallach, who mentioned
Landon’s role in 'Bonanza.' “Little Joe has left us,” Wallach wrote.
“Television will miss the richness of his talent.”
By Mark Goodman (July 15 1991)
After a ferocious final
battle, Michael Landon succumbed to cancer quickly, quietly - and with the
family he cherished near his bed. To countless television viewers over the last
three decades, Michael Landon was the shaggy -haired, ruggedly boyish
personification of heartland pieties. As Little Joe Cartwright (Bonanza) and
Charles Ingalls (Little House on the Prairie), he radiated the warmth of home,
hearth and old - fashioned American neighborliness, as well as a sense of
bulldog perseverance against all calamities, natural and man - made. As Jonathan
Smith, the angel sublimely aware of earthly troubles in Highway To Heaven, he
traced a path toward a community of the human spirit. Moreover, as a writer,
director and producer, he became a phenomenally successful
entertainment force, one of the few actors to grab the reins of his own career
and harness it to his personal vision. Off screen Landon represented rougher
facets of the American dream. The warmth and sense of familial loyalty were
there to be sure. He fathered six children and adopted three more and clung
fiercely to family rhythms – perhaps, in part, because he was the classic
unhappy child who determined to make, by sheer force of will, the largest
possible imprint upon a hostile world. And so when it was announced on April 8
that Landon, 54, had fallen victim to pancreatic cancer, a stunned public
watched in solemn awe as he turned to make the stand of his life. “If I’m
gonna die,” he told Life magazine three weeks after his diagnosis,
“death’s gonna have to do a lot of fighting to get me.” It was indeed a
hard fight but Landon lost, of course, in a final, painful scene that he wished
only his wife to share. After the discovery of the cancer, which had spread to
his liver, Landon retreated with his third wife, Cindy, 34, and their two young
children to his 10-acre Malibu ranch, where he girded for the battle with a
vegetarian diet, a program of vitamins, enzymes and acupuncture. He underwent
chemotherapy on April 18. In early May he submitted to an experimental procedure
consisting of intravenous administration of a cancer-fighting drug. These
treatments had little chance of success. Only 3 percent of pancreatic patients
and 5 percent of liver cancer sufferers survive for five years. According to the
American Cancer Society, studies link smoking and alcohol use with these forms
of malignancy. Landon has admitted that he indulged too much in both. Says
retired NBC publicist Bill Kiley: “We used to say we bet his socks smelled
smoky, because he inhaled so deeply.” As word of his condition spread,
thousands of letters of encouragement and sympathy arrived daily. Scores of
friends visited the house and stood vigil at the gates of the ranch. “I have X
amount of energy,” said Landon, “and what I have, I want to spend with my
family.” Landon’s youngest children, Sean, 4, and Jennifer, 7, were
“emotionally distraught,” says longtime
friend and business partner Kent McCray, “but Michael passed his strength
along to them.” Up until the end, says McCray, “his mind was clicking
away….He was telling jokes, he was very lucid, very bright, there was nothing
down about it.” When his publicist, Harry Flynn, wondered two weeks ago
whether to take a short vacation, Landon said, “Don’t be silly. Have a good
time. I’ll be fine.” Says Flynn: “He sounded fine. But then he went
downhill in just a few days.” Over those last days his condition deteriorated
rapidly. On his last weekend, Landon gathered his inner circle at the ranch,
including Cindy, all nine of his children and McCray and his wife. They kept a
vigil in Landon’s upstairs bedroom, where very near the end, according to
McCray, Landon said, “I love you all very much, but would you all go
downstairs and give me some time with Cindy.” She was the only one with him
when he died, at around 1:20 p.m. on Monday, July 1. Landon’s body was
cremated the next day, and at that time, no plans had been announced for a
funeral or memorial service. If his friends and family had solace, it was in
Landon’s extraordinary calm. Says Flynn of his old friend’s last hours:
“It was like going off a diving board. He knew it was coming, and he was brave
to the last.” Landon was a paradoxical perfectionist who spent a lifetime
trying to perform and portray worthy deeds and then kicking tail when anyone got
in his way. “Yes, I am perfect. It’s a problem I’ve had all my life,” he
reportedly snapped to Ed Friendly, co-creator of 'Little House on the Prairie',
during a fierce 1974 argument. (Friendly was gone before the series aired.) This
sense of solitary righteousness – and frontier methods of inflicting his will
– was bred into Landon early. Born Eugene Orowitz on Oct. 31, 1936, in Forest
Hills, N.Y., he grew up with his sister in Collingswood, N.J. His Jewish father,
Eli Orowitz, was a theater manager and film publicist, his Irish-Catholic
mother, Peggy O’Neill, was a minor actress who gave up her career. Eugene
watched his parents bicker endlessly. “Tell your father dinner is ready,”
Landon recalled his mother saying – though Eli was in the room. High school
boys screamed “Jew bastard!” at Landon from passing cars. In a largely
Christian community, fathers wouldn’t allow their daughters to go out with
him. The family and social pressures made him a chronic bed wetter. The
humiliation was increased by his mother’s practice of hanging the soaked
sheets from his bedroom window. College only reinforced his sense of isolation.
Eugene forged himself into a top-flight javelin thrower in high school
and set the national record in his senior year with a record toss of 211 feet 7
inches. That won him a track scholarship to the University of Southern
California. But athlete or no, a dreamy kid from New Jersey with curly,
shoulder-length hair was not likely to be welcomed on a crew-cut 1950s campus.
His teammates mocked him and even pinned him down and cut off his hair. Landon,
furious, threw his arm out on a toss, lost his scholarship and soon quit school.
Even before the haircut and the lost scholarship came a melancholy moment that
made an even deeper wound in Landon. In 1954 Landon journeyed to L.A. with his
publicity-agent father, who believed that his former colleagues at RKO Radio
Pictures, by now Paramount studios, would offer him a job. “Wait here,” he
told his son at the gate. I’ll be back in a minute.” Thirty minutes later
his father returned, crestfallen; he couldn’t even get past the guard. Years
later Landon told a reporter that the humiliating moment spawned a life’s
decision. “No matter what I did,” he said, “I wasn’t going to owe
anybody a favor. And I didn’t expect anything from anybody that had to do with
business….I wasn’t going to take any garbage from anybody, either.” As it
turned out, he didn’t have to: A film executive spotted him and suggested that
he enroll in Warner Bros. Acting school. Soon, Landon was performing in
prestigious TV productions on Studio One and G.E. Theater. He made his movie
debut in 1957 in a cult favorite of the day, I Was A Teenage Werewolf – as its
werewolf star. At about the same time, Landon began a stormy marital career. In
1956 he married legal secretary Dodie Fraser, a relationship that lasted six
years. He adopted Dodie’s son, Mark, and another boy, Josh. The couple
divorced in 1962, and in 1963 Landon married model Lynn Noe, with whom he had
four children (Michael Jr., Christopher, Leslie and Shawna). He also adopted
Noe’s daughter Cheryl. His acting career really took off when he landed the
role of Little Joe in bonanza, the first Western series broadcast in color.
Landon, Lorne Greene, Dan Blocker and Pernell Roberts made the widowed
Cartwright and his boys the first family of the West, and the show enjoyed a
14-year run. Greene took Landon under his wing and once described him this way:
“Mike’s a very sweet guy but extremely stubborn….He’s too impulsive.
Mike will do a thing one day that he’ll regret eight days later. When it comes
to a sense of humor, Mike has a terrific one.” Roberts didn’t think so. He
and Landon – who by the mid-60s was also directing episodes – clashed on the
set. Roberts left the show after six years. (Now Bonanza’s last survivor,
Roberts would say nothing more last week but that he was “deeply grieved by
Michael’s death.”) Landon’s single-minded ferocity began to unfold during
the Bonanza years. To cope with his emerging fame, during the show’s second
season, he began popping dozens of tranquilizer pills a day. He eventually
kicked the pill habit. “I still work long days,” Landon once conceded of his
tendency toward overdrive. “I’ve always had to work very hard in order to be
happy.” In his last weeks at the ranch, his illness drew the attention of
hundreds of thousands of fans, many of them young TV viewers who had grown up
with Landon as our culture’s most visible repository of a sense of common
decency, of the moral fitness of things. This universal chord struck by Landon
was echoed by his old colleague, former President Ronald Reagan, who said,
“His tragic battle with cancer touched the hearts of every American, as did
his indomitable spirit.” And Landon closed his own book with a stolid grace
that refused to succumb to tragedy. “It’s not like I’ve missed a hell of a
lot,” he said. “I’ve had a pretty good lick here.”
By Ellen Grehan (July 16 1991)
Within an hour after Michael passed away, Cindy walked through the gardens of her estate with two of Michael’s daughters from his previous marriage. Cindy said her final goodbye to her husband as the mortuary attendants drove his remains away from the Malibu, Calif., ranch he loved so much.
By Timothy Carlson (July 20 1991)
Shortly after 1pm on the afternoon of Monday, July1, Michael Landon's three-month battle against inoperable cancer of the pancreas and liver came to an end. The 54 year old star of three of television's most beloved and enduring family series - Bonanza, Little House on the Prairie and Highway To Heaven - had sensed that the end was near on the Friday before he died, reports his longtime publicist, Harry Flynn. "He had a lot of pain and he was very uncomfortable. He was coughing at night and it was not pleasant." Landon's condition worsened, his wife, Cindy, who had been his mainstay throughout the ordeal, gathered his nine children, ranging in age from 42 to 4, and a few close friends at the couple's Malibu home. They talked, they touched and they hugged one another throughout the weekend. "He was in pain, there was no question," says Kent McCray, Landon's longtime partner, who visited him with his wife Susan, the day he died. "His legs, from the phlebitis, were giving him pain. The cancer itself was giving him pain. It was tough to digest anything. But his mind at all times was extremely alert. He looked up at Susan and said, 'I like your jacket, and I love your glasses.' He always remarked on how people looked. This is where his mind was. He had his faculties right until the end. His spirits were up. The love was vary evident in everybody." Landon spent a peaceful Monday morning. But, then, weakened by his struggle against the disease and attached to a morphine drip that barely masked the pain he was feeling, Landon told his children: "I love you all, but go downstairs now. I want to be alone with Cindy." After a few moments in private with his third wife whom he adored, Michael Landon passed away. "When he was gone, everybody went back up and, in their own way, said their goodbyes to him," says McCray.
Landon
had chosen to face death alone with his wife because he knew "it would not
be easy for the children," says Flynn. "He was a very caring guy. His
thoughts were for everyone else." Karen Grassle, who played his wife on
Little House, perhaps best summarizes the legacy Landon leaves - and the sense
of loss his friends now feel - when she says: "I prayed for a miracle for
Michael, and I am devastated by the news of his death. I knew what his prognosis
was. But, the thing is, he believed in miracles. In some ways, that was his
message, his legacy." Upon hearing the news of his death, Melissa
Gilbert-Brinkman, who played his daughter on Little House, said: "There is
a big hole in my heart....He was like a father to me. He was my friend. I will
miss him so much. But I will carry his legacy on in my life, in my work and in
my heart forever."
The day after Landon died, the cast and crew who had been with him for nearly 30 years and who were like a family gathered at the Malibu compound to share their grief. There was much talk of Landon's love of practical jokes, says Flynn, how he'd have frogs pop out of his mouth at the most inappropriate times. He kept his sense of humor till the end, Flynn recalls. "I called him a few weeks ago and I said: 'God, you sound great!' He said: 'It isn't my voice that's sick, Harry!' But the overwhelming feeling amoung the mourners was an eerie sense of displacement, as if the earth had shifted for them. "When we all got together in the room, it was like, 'Here we are without our Daddy,' says Flynn. That sounds terrible, but it was the truth. We were just realising we had to go on without him."
"People ask me what will happen to Michael Landon Productions," says McCray. "It can't go on without the leader. I would like to try, in my way. I feel there is a need for the kind of stories he produced. People do want them. How am I going to handle it, I don't know. But Michael always said, 'You've got to go on. One person out of the link doesn't mean you come to a stop.' Thank goodness for syndication, for it means the legacy will go on and on."
By Cindy Landon as told to Brad Darrach (December 1991)
I still can’t believe
Michael is gone. I wake up in the middle of the night and stare at the ceiling,
feeling so lonely and lost. I can’t wait for morning to come, because then
I’m up and doing for the kids and I can push the ache away. Thank God I’ve
got the little ones. Sometimes they drive me crazy – Jennifer is eight and
Sean is five and believe me, they’re a handful –but I don’t know what
I’d do without them. They miss Michael terribly too. When I asked Sean why he
never speaks about his father, his lip began to tremble and he said in a quavery
voice, “Because it makes me sad.” And the other day Jennifer taped a note to
her bedroom door. “Please come in Mom or Dad if he’s back.” The whole year
has been a strange and terrible dream. Michael was so incredibly strong and
vital, and he was only 54. All he needed was four hours’ sleep a night, and
just weeks before the symptoms started he was bench-pressing 350 pounds. Then in
early February he began having abdominal pains. But you could never get Michael
to a doctor. Finally I made the appointment, and they examined him for an ulcer.
Nothing there, but they gave him some medicine and it seemed to help. Then, in
March, just before we took a holiday to Utah, the pains came back strong and I
told him if he didn’t go in for a lower-GI we weren’t going on vacation.
Well, I knew he didn’t have the test, but he came home with some more stomach
medicine and we went. On the trip he was in tremendous pain, and I got scared. I
thought maybe he had an intestinal blockage, so I got him to fly home a day
early and take tests. That night he called me and said it was a problem with his
pancreas. He tried to sound calm, but there was something in his voice. I found
out later that the doctors had already told him it was a large tumor on the
pancreas, probably a cancer that had spread to the liver, and that he had a few
months or at most a year to live. Anyway, I freaked out and started to cry. He
tried to comfort me, but when I said I was flying home immediately he didn’t
hang tough in his usual way. He just said, “Yeah.” Then I really knew, and I
felt horrible because he needed me and I wasn’t there. Two days later we had
the results of the biopsy:
pancreatic cancer that had metastasized to the liver.
It was a death sentence. Less than a 1 percent chance of a cure. My whole body
went numb. It was like I was in a movie and watching it at the same time, like I
was going through the motions but it wasn’t really me. Then suddenly I felt
this surge of anger. Anger at life, at everything. Why is this happening? It
isn’t fair! But the next day I saw an old woman begging on a street corner. My
heart just went out to her, and I gave her some money. And suddenly the anger
was gone. At first Michael was stunned, too, but he never got angry, never gave
in to self-pity, never cursed his fate. He just faced the truth and made himself
live with it. He faced death, and he wasn’t afraid, not for a minute. He
believed in God, and I think he was actually curious about what came next – he
looked at dying as another journey. He didn’t want to die, don’t get me
wrong. He loved his work, loved his family, loved his life. He hated leaving
everything he loved. I can still see him sitting in a wheelchair in the hallway
of the hospital, looking at me with tears in his eyes and saying quietly,
“Cindy, this is just the beginning.” He meant the beginning of a very bad
time, but he also meant the beginning of our fight to save his life. It was a
fight we lost, but we fought hard, and we fought every step of the way together.
I prayed every day for a miracle, for Michael to beat this thing. Michael
prayed, too, but not like: Please God, don’t let me die. He just prayed for
us, and for the strength to accept whatever happened. “It’s not God that
does it,” Michael often said. “It’s the disease that does it. God
doesn’t give you cancer.” We prayed and worked and planned what we had to
do. I told Michael we had to tell the whole family right away, because it would
be terrible if Jennifer and Sean heard it first at school of if the older
children heard it on a newscast. So we made telephone calls to the family, and
then we sat down with Jennifer and Sean. We told them that Daddy had a very
serious type of cancer, that Daddy could die, that Daddy was going to try not
to. We told them calmly, and Sean seemed to take the news fairly calmly, but
I’m not sure he really understood. Jennifer had some rough moments.
Michael’s older children were devastated by the news. But we agreed we
weren’t going to give up. We went looking for cures. The doctors wanted him to
start chemotherapy right away, but they admitted that there had rarely been a
case of pancreatic cancer cured by chemo. Besides, Michael hated the idea of
filling his body with poison, and so did I. But it turned out that pancreatic
cancer had more often been cured by alternative methods. So we tried a holistic
approach. He went on a diet of creamed papaya supplemented by fruit and
vegetable juices, 13 pints a day. He also ate oatmeal and brown rice, and took
large doses of vitamins and enzymes to build up his immunity. Right away the
pain in his abdomen went away and he began to feel much better, almost like his
old self. He kept improving, until after about three weeks he began to believe
that, against all the odds, he was getting better. So he decided to have a
second CAT scan to prove that the doctors were wrong. I remember sitting there
in a radiologist’s office, waiting for the pictures to be developed. We were
hopeful, but terribly anxious too. Then we saw the pictures, and I felt as if
I’d been kicked in the stomach. Michael took one look and said, “It’s
grown.” In less than three weeks the cancer had almost doubled in size. On the
way home in the limo we didn’t say much. Up to that point I don’t think
Michael had really and truly believed that he was going to die, and I know I
hadn’t. That afternoon, for the first time, we both realized what lay ahead.
He was in shock, and I was terribly scared. I just lay with my head on his lap
and cried. He stroked my hair and said, “I know, I know.” When we got home,
the kids were back from school, happy and excited, and I looked at them and for
the first time I thought: Maybe my babies are going to lose their father. As
soon as we could, we sent them out to play. Then we went upstairs and lay down,
and held each other, and cried. That’s the way we were. Incredibly close.
After 13 years, incredibly much in love. We were simply meant to be together.
Then, now, forever. After all those years, when Michael would come home early,
my heart could start beating hard just to see him come in that door. Oh, I’m
not saying we didn’t have disagreements. Who doesn’t? We’d disagree at
times, for instance, about the kids’ bedtimes and table manners – he was
easygoing, I was more the disciplinarian. Michael often told me I was full of
fire, and he liked that about me. I enjoy life and I like to laugh. And I’m
very loving. So was Michael. We nourished our love and it kept growing. We were
soul mates. I’m a down-to-earth person, so I know it sounds silly, but every
little girl dreams of meeting her prince. I met mine. I had a fairy-tale
marriage. It was that way from the start. I was 19 when I was hired as a
stand-in on Little House on the Prairie. I was romantic, and the minute I laid
eyes on Michael I got this terrible crush. I thought he was the most handsome,
brilliant, witty, exciting man I’d ever seen – it’s true, I still think
so. But I didn’t seriously imagine we’d ever be together. Michael was
married, and I wasn’t setting out to capture a married man. What I didn’t
know was that Michael and his wife, Lynn, had grown apart. Anyway, as time went
on, I noticed him watching me, and I thought: Am I imagining things? But he
really was watching me, and this made me very excited. He began to do little
things. Like he would bring me a snow cone. So I would bring him a yogurt. Then
one day he thought he heard me say I like a man with hair on his chest, so he
went to the makeup room and came out with this huge wad of false hair sticking
out of his shirt. I cracked up. But gradually things got more serious. One night
I went to my car and there was a tiny stuffed animal on the seat, and a tender
note. Another time there were roses. My heart just got – crazy. I thought
about him all the time. Finally, after I’d been with the show almost a year,
he came to my apartment one night after a party on the set. After that we were
like love struck teenagers. I remember our first date. We went to see Monty
Python and the Holy Grail and ate popcorn and held hands in the dark. Sometimes
he’d drive by my apartment in his green Ferrari and shout out the window, “I
love you, Cindy Clerico!” I mean, in broad daylight! In Beverly Hills! I
thought: This man is nuts. The fact is he was ready to make the break with his
wife. He wanted to get caught. He wanted to be happy. Michael had everything,
everything to live for. His family and his work were thriving. He’d just
finished the pilot for his new series, Us, and he told me it was going to be the
best he had ever done, the story of a real person with real problems and real
faults. He’d also signed a deal to make theatrical movies, and he was writing
the script for his first picture when he found out he had cancer. He was so
resilient, but the second cat scan knocked a lot of the fight out of him. He
didn’t altogether give up – the next morning it was, "OK, what do we try
now?" – but I think he stopped really believing he could get well. I know he
stopped believing he could get well just by keeping to his diet and building up
his immune system. So we went back to the oncologists, and they told him his
only hope was chemotherapy. They proposed some new, experimental forms of chemo
that sounded promising, and he gave the go-ahead. He hated the idea, but he felt
he had to try something because he loved us and didn’t want to leave us. Right
after heavy chemotherapy began, things started to go downhill. He had regular
episodes of internal bleeding, and dangerous clots would form without warning.
One evening, after the kids were in bed, we kicked back in the family room and
started to watch a movie, and we both thought: Gee, isn’t this great?
Everything seems so normal, just like old times. Then all at once Michael felt a
terrible pain in his leg. It was a blood clot, and we had to rush off to the
hospital, 40 miles away. Finally he had a tiny “umbrella” as the doctors
called it, put in a vein, and that stopped the clots from going to his heart or
his lungs. But the surgical procedure left him with a secondary infection, and
he had to go on antibiotics. And so it went, on and on. Michael fought back. The
day
after he had a liver biopsy he showed up at the gym and did a brisk workout
on the Gravitron machine. Yet as the cancer progressed, the pain in his liver
became intense. We had two nurses in the daytime, but in the evenings Michael
and I were alone together. We had long talks. “Think how lucky we’ve
been,” He’d say. “How lucky we met. How lucky we’ve had all these
wonderful years together.” And he’d say, “Cindy, if I’m going to die,
it’s probably better if I die now than if I died in ten years. You’re still
young, and it’ll be easier for you to get on with your life.” I wanted to
scream when he said things like that, but I just smiled and passed on to the
next thing. I knew he was trying to soften the blow. As the weeks went by the
pains got worse, and we had to put him on morphine and percocet. He got a little
thinner, too, but he was never down to 90 pounds, like the tabloids said, and
thank God the chemo didn’t make his hair drop out. Even there, Michael turned
his anxiety into a joke. He said if he lost his hair they could put his picture
on the cover of Bowlers’ Journal. The sense of humor was there to the end, but
as he got weaker his sadness grew. I’d walk into the bedroom and find him
crying quietly. When I’d ask what was wrong, he’d say, “It’s not seeing
you again.” When the children came in, he’d look at them so long and so
intensely – as though trying to take in everything about them. He would touch
their hands and faces, and tears would fill his eyes. But he had no regrets, no
feeling he should have lived life differently. He’d done what he wanted to do
and done it with all his strength, and that was that. Finally the day came when
he said, “Cindy, I’m dying. I can feel it in my body. I’ve got a week to
live.” He was right. He died exactly one week later. All that last week I saw
him fading. Somehow the reporters knew and came swarming around like vultures.
It was a deathwatch. I was outraged and so was Michael. “What is this,” he
said, “some sort of frigging game?” On Sunday morning, June 30th,
I knew the end was near, so I called all his children and his closest friends,
and they came to the house. Michael was Michael. Very alert. Talking with
everybody and joking. Later in the day he began dozing, off and on. The pain got
worse, and we had to increase his morphine and percocet. The nurses said the end
could come at any time, so we stayed there with him through the afternoon and
into the night. Michael drifted into a dreamlike state, neither awake nor
asleep, and began talking in a rambling way. Then he started coughing up blood.
At about 11 o’clock, everybody went off to get some sleep. I stayed with him
through the night. In the morning everybody gathered around his bed again –
Jennifer and Sean were there too – and we were all crying because we knew it
was the end. Then all of a sudden Michael became completely alert, sat up,
looked around at all of us standing there and said, “Oh, hi guys.” And he
smiled and said, “I love you very much.” Everybody was startled and very
emotional. But pretty soon they said goodbye because Michael didn’t want a lot
of people watching him when he died. When I was there with him alone, we talked
a little and hugged. The he went back into the dreamlike state and began
rambling and waving his arms. I realized that he was directing a movie in his
mind. “Put a 50 over here,” he said – a 50 is a stage lamp. “Tell that
guy he’s lying the wrong way.” Then he started writing in the air, and a
minute later he sat up and actually pulled on a pair of imaginary boots. After
that he grabbed my blouse and tried to tie it in a bow. I told him to relax,
calm down, because his movements were getting frantic. I asked him, “Do you
know who I am?” He said, looking right at me, “Mm. Yeah.” And I said, “I
love you.” And he said, “I love you too.” Those were Michael’s last
words. He lay down and began breathing heavily. Pretty soon his breathing became
deeper and less frequent. I called the nurse, who came running in and put a
stethoscope to his chest. Michael took one last breath, and was gone. I just sat
there beside him. I was numb. I couldn’t believe what had just happened. I
don’t remember if I said anything. I just remember that I sat there. Ten
minutes, 15 minutes. Then I went downstairs and told everybody that Michael was
gone, and they came up to the bedroom again. All at once there was a terrible
roaring overhead. It was a helicopter from one of the television stations! I
couldn’t believe it. How dare they take this moment from us! Then the roaring
went away, and we all sat there with Michael a little while longer. Suddenly we
heard screaming. It was Jennifer, who
had run out of the house and climbed to
the top of our swing set, about 10 feet in the air. She was screaming and
screaming, “No! Not my daddy! I don’t want my daddy to die!” People tried
to pull her down, but I was calm – the way Michael was in a crisis. It was
almost as if I were Michael. “Let her be,” I said. “Let her get it out.”
Then I talked to her, and she came down, and soon she was sobbing quietly in my
arms. About an hour later the undertaker’s van arrived, and I went up to
Michael again – and I got a shock. There he lay in the same place, but he
looked like an entirely different person. Everything had been sucked out and he
was just an empty shell. And then they took him. I had always walked Michael out
to the car to say goodbye, so I had to go with him this one last time. It was
very hard. But I went with him to say goodbye.
By Tom Gliatto, Kristina Johnson & Vicki Sheff (February 10 1992)
“We
miss everything about Dad,” says Leslie, 29, his daughter by Lynn, who is a
family therapist. “There isn’t a day goes by when I don’t think of him.”
A battler by nature, he fought his cancer on as many fronts as he could. He
underwent experimental chemotherapy and stuck to a “natural” regimen that
included a mostly vegetarian diet and acupuncture. “Every time I would call
him and say, ‘Hi, Dad, how are you doing?’” Leslie recalls, “it was
always, ‘I’m great. Everything is fine.’” Then came the devastating news
that the tumor in his pancreas had doubled in size in less than a month (the
disease had already spread to his liver). The signs of defeat became clear on
Father’s Day, June 16. “He had told me earlier that he knew he was dying,”
says Cindy. Then, that day, “he was in the family room and he needed help just
getting up the stairs with his portable oxygen tank,” she says. For the
children too, Father’s Day marked a turning point. “I’d usually go out and
get him something for tennis or sports,” says Leslie. But this year she bought
him Gatorade and slippers with little basketballs on the toes. (At the time
Michael had been watching the NBA play-offs.) Her sister Shawna, 20, a
college-sophomore, gave him silk pajamas. Says Leslie: “It was like, ‘What
can I give him that he’ll enjoy now?’” For Chris the difference had the
feel of a sea change. “I was the father and he was the son,” he says. “I
had to help him up the stairs. I am sad sometimes…” His voice breaks. “…
sad sometimes when I think that I never said, ‘Sorry.’” Leslie clutches
his hand. “it’s OK,” she says. Crying, Chris continues, “I never looked
at him and told him that I was sorry he was losing his life.” “In the last
month and a half, “ says Leslie, “you started to take your time with him
because you just knew. There was a longing in Dad’s eyes when he was watching
everyone.” In a sense he even peered at the Landons yet to come. When
daughter-in-law Sharee Landon, 27, Michael Jr.’s wife, was eight months into
her pregnancy, “Dad used to put his hand on her tummy,” says Leslie. “He
would close his eyes and go, ‘Aaaaaaah,’ as if he was loving the baby.”
“I remember being with him at Jennifer and Sean’s school,” says
Cindy. “It was PE time for Sean, and he came running over and said, ‘Hey,
Dad, watch me! I’m going to run my laps now.’ And I remember Michael looking
at him and shaking his head and starting to cry.” To prepare Jennifer and Sean
for his death, Michael and Cindy would read them a children’s book called
Butterflies. “Dad would explain that when he died, his body would be like the
cocoon,” says Leslie, “and his spirit would be like the butterfly, looking
down at his old existence.” “Dad always made us feel good about heaven,”
says Jennifer. “See, I like marshmallows, so he would say that I could eat as
many as I want in heaven.” At the end of June, a visiting nurse warned that
Landon – down 30 lbs. To a mere 135 and exhausted with pain – had at most a
day to live. Cindy called the kids back to the ranch to make their goodbyes.
They gathered in his bedroom and waited. “He was ready to go,” says Leslie.
“We told him, ‘Let go, Dad.’” “You could say a thousand goodbyes,”
says Chris, “and it would never be enough.” The older kids spent the night
camping out on sofas. Sean came downstairs at 2 in the morning, remembers
Leslie’s husband, Brian Matthews, 31. “First he told me, ‘My daddy isn’t
dead yet,’’ Brian says. “Then, ‘Daddy told me he could be anything he
wants in heaven.’ So I asked him what he wanted his daddy to be, and he said,
‘I’d like him to be a crab, so he can cut through the clouds and drop back
down and be with us.’” “He really showed us how to handle death,” says
adopted son Mark, 43, a grocery clerk and aspiring actor. “I’d want to go
with dignity, like he did.” That night, Cindy and Jennifer both slept with an
article of Michael’s clothing. But, the Landon’s have learned, there’s no
real way to swaddle grief. “It comes in waves, and it will hit you when you
don’t expect it,” says Leslie. “A picture, a song, a movie.” Shawna will
be driving her car and just start crying. Chris had to walk out of a physiology
class during a discussion on euthanasia. Cindy has settled back into a daily
routine. It helps, she says, that Landon left her “some beautiful letters in a
little book. I read those quite often. They’re about how to remain strong and
solid.” At least, she says, “I can sleep now without waking and staring at
the ceiling, feeling alone.” She’s not alone this afternoon. Whichever way
Cindy looks, she can see Michael in his family. “There is so much of him in
all of us,” says Chris, turning to Leslie and suddenly grinning. “You can be
raunchy, and so was he,” he teases. “Dad loved to bring in fantasy play and
pretending, which is a lot of what we do with the little ones still,” says
Leslie. “There are games that I play with them that Dad taught Mike Jr. and me
when we were little – like African safari in the pool.” But, ultimately,
what Michael taught his family wasn’t just about playtime but about a whole
lifetime. “When Brian and I have kids,” says Leslie, “there’ll be so
much that we’ll teach them because of the love of my dad and our family.
We’re going to live life to the fullest, like Dad did.” After three hours of
sharing stories about Michael, the family almost seems to have conjured him into
their presence. “I think he protects this house,” says Cindy.
“Sometimes,” says Leslie, “I will go up and sit in his closet among his
clothes to feel closer to him.” “When I walk into the TV room,” says
Shawna, “that one chair that he always sat in reminds me of him. You can see
that tuft of brown hair.” “And he’s always roll his toes,” says Chris.
“You can almost hear his toes cracking when you go in there.” He pauses.
“When I used to think about death, I’d say, ‘I don’t want to die at
all!’ But now,” he says, “I say the worst that’s going to happen is that
I’ll see Dad again.” Leslie holds Chris’s hand. “I know,” she tells
him, “we are all going to be together again.”
Michael Landon