20-odd years ago James Toback told me that “almost none of us are going to die as pleasantly as we’d like to…death always happens under circumstances we can’t foresee, much less plan for, and sooner than we’d like.”

Plus, he might have added, the likelihood that we’re going to die while lying comfortably in bed between recently-washed sheets with a fire crackling nearby and your cat or dog lying peacefully next to you is almost nil. The odds are that your final throes are going to either be painful or traumatic or grotesque, and possibly a combination of all three.

Toback could have been talking about the curious, almost certainly traumatic deaths of Gene Hackman and wife Betsy Arakawa.

If and when a seriously old person (90-plus) with a moderate interest in living…what generally happens when an 80something or 90-something person is experiencing troubling symptoms? What do they tend to do? I’ll tell you what they tend to do. They tend to say things like “uhm, I don’t feel so good”, which is always followed by a wife or a nurse or a daughter driving the elderly person to a clinic or hospital, or perhaps calling an ambulance. That’s the way it usually goes.

Generally speaking the old ailing person doesn’t fall to the floor (especially in a semi-unsanitary “mud room”) and go “aaaggghhh!” and die right then and there.

And even if this does happen, the much younger, presumably responsible-minded wife (Arakawa was 63)…generally the caregiver doesn’t panic or freak out by swallowing a bunch of pills and then falling on the bathroom floor and dying herself, and at the same time somehow encouraging the family dog to commit suicide with her.

Any way you slice this, Gene and Betsy clearly did not experience peaceful, placid exits from our mortal coil. The odds are that Toback’s scenario — “painful or traumatic or grotesque” — prevailed.

Does anyone reading this article have any stories about parents or great uncles or aunts being found dead on the floor? I didn’t think so.

Generally speaking when you get old life starts telling you in little ways that getting old sucks balls and that, as Bette Davis famously said, “it’s not for sissies”. You are reminded over and over that the quality of life isn’t what it was 10 or 20 years earlier, and a far cry from what it was in middle age. (Don’t even mention your youth.) And then you get even older and it gets a bit worse…the water may be sparkling clean but it’s still swirling downward in the bowl.

Unless, that is, you’ve been blessed with strong German genes (like me) or unless you’re a health food nut and a workout Nazi, in which case the joys of life can continue to be savored.

Norman Lloyd was a happy or at least a moderately contented man when he turned 100, and as far as I know he stayed that way until he died at 106.

I’m guessing that Gene Hackman was going downhill like most 90somethings (he walked with a cane) but it doesn’t figure that he would just keel over and die in a mud room. (He left no suicide note, and I haven’t read that he made an emergency phone call.) And it really, really doesn’t figure that his 32-years-younger wife would, upon finding his body, go “aaaggh, I can’t stand it!” and decide to impulsively kill herself, and not in her bedroom but on the floor of the fucking bathroom.

Oh, and “Fido? You need to swallow these pills, baby…they’ll be good for you.”

Repeating: “Almost none of us are going to die as pleasantly as we’d like to.”

“Serene Acceptance“, posted on 4.4.13:

“I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear,” Roger Ebert wrote in a 9.15.11 Salon piece. “I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. I am grateful for the gifts of intelligence, love, wonder and laughter. You can’t say it wasn’t interesting. My lifetime’s memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.

“I don’t expect to die anytime soon. But it could happen this moment, while I am writing. I was talking the other day with Jim Toback, a friend of 35 years, and the conversation turned to our deaths, as it always does. ‘Ask someone how they feel about death,’ he said, ‘and they’ll tell you everyone’s gonna die. Ask them, In the next 30 seconds? No, no, no, that’s not gonna happen. How about this afternoon? No. What you’re really asking them to admit is, Oh my God, I don’t really exist. I might be gone at any given second.’

“Me too,” Roger answers. “But I hope not. I have plans. [But] I have no desire to live forever. The concept frightens me. I am 69, have had cancer, will die sooner than most of those reading this. That is in the nature of things. In my plans for life after death, I say, again with Walt Whitman:

“I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

“If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.”

I don’t want a Toback death…please. No car crashes, no road-rage shootings, no JFK-in-Dealey-Plaza blood spatterings. I want to drowse off in a well-dressed state on top of my well-padded, queen-size bed, and with my hair pleasantly thickened and styled. Slim jeans, light-gray socks, shined Italian loafers, high-thread-count T-shirt, jean jacket. I want to gently go to sleep with my cats lying next to me, and with a Bluray of Martin Ritt‘s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold playing on the 65″ Sony 4K.

Or, failing that, I want to collapse on a side street in Paris, preferably cobblestoned, and die of a heart attack as I gaze up at the clear night sky.