By this point, Cynthia and I had realized we had become mutually indispensable. Neither one of us could imagine life without the other. However, Cynthia was filled with forebodings and premonitions and had constant nightmares about my impending doom.
These were not entirely ill founded, because Wired magazine had asked me to go to Sarajevo during the Serbo-Croatian war at the height of the shelling. They wanted me to write about the relationship between information and war and the way in which the mass media had created a hallucination that was destroying the ability of each side to see the other’s humanity. Of course I’d accepted the assignment and had already been issued my flak jacket and helmet by the United Nations.
Cynthia was absolutely convinced I was going to get killed over there. I didn’t believe it. I felt that despite there being a lot of bullets addressed to whom it might concern, none of them had my name on them. I offered her repeated assurances, but they were not particularly comforting to her.
In April 1994, shortly before I was to leave on the assignment, I went out to Los Angeles to give a speech and was staying with Daryl. Tim Leary had gotten tickets and backstage passes for John, Daryl, Cynthia, and me to go with him to a Pink Floyd concert at the Rose Bowl, but John called and said he couldn’t come because his mother, who was suffering from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, had suddenly taken a turn for the worse.
Cynthia was supposed to fly out with John but instead came by herself. Daryl was so angry that John didn’t come that she decided to spend the day with her horses in Santa Barbara. Both Cynthia and I had been suffering from one of those persistent flu viruses that can hang on for weeks at a time. Whenever we thought we were getting better, it would grab us again.
That afternoon, Cynthia and I went over to Tim Leary’s house, and death was on everything. It was the weirdest thing because Tim wasn’t even sick yet but looked like he was dying. I never saw him look that sick again until he actually died.
Aileen Getty was living there at the time and she claimed to be dying of AIDS. Bow the dog had gone blind, and he looked like he was dying. The only person who really looked alive that day was Cynthia. At one point, we were sitting out in the garden together and a black cat that Barbara had left behind came out of the foliage. Cynthia jumped up and screamed.
I said, “Why did you do that?” And she said, “There’s something about that cat.” I said, “Surely, you’re not superstitious?” And she said, “I’m superstitious about that cat. That cat means no good.”
Later that afternoon, Cynthia went into Tim’s office. He looked truly moribund, and so she put her hands on his head and started to stroke his temples, and it was as if a strange transfer of life took place between them. I really don’t know how else to describe it.
The huge 1994 Northridge earthquake had significantly rearranged the traffic infrastructure between Beverly Hills and Pasadena. As a result, we had to wade through three and a half hours of traffic to get to the Rose Bowl. By the time we got there, the will call window was closed. Tim and Aileen decided they didn’t want to deal with it and left.
However, while Cynthia and I were sitting together in our car for three and a half hours along with ninety thousand other concertgoers, we got to talking about the future, something we had agreed not to think about. We felt the best way to create a good future was to maintain a well-wrought present. Up to that point, Cynthia had been adamantly opposed to having children, but she suddenly said, “I think you and I should have children. And if we’re going to do that, I would love to start soon so we should be married. How do you feel about that?”
Even though I was not yet divorced from Elaine, I said, “That’s all right.” On some profound level, it seemed that we had been married ever since we had met.
We used the rest of our time in the car to plot out the next couple of years. We would move to San Francisco in September and buy a house. She would set up her new practice there over the winter. We would get married in the spring and then start having babies shortly thereafter.
Our passage into the concert was no easy deal. We had to buy scalper’s tickets at a prodigious price, and the seating left a lot to be desired. But nevertheless, Cynthia danced like a dust devil. It was a moment of unadulterated delight.
Once the show was over we had to find our car, which we had parked on a golf course next to the Rose Bowl. Because it was ad hoc parking, there were no markings for area identification and we trudged around the golf course for two hours looking for our car.
Cynthia started to feel the effects of the flu taking hold again. She said, “I feel like I want to crawl out of my own skin.” And I said, “Don’t do that, darling. Your skin wouldn’t look anything like it should without you in it.” By the time we got back to Daryl’s house, Cynthia was completely exhausted, but she still went running on the beach in Santa Monica the next morning.
Cynthia was going to be thirty years old in two days, and we’d planned a big splashy birthday party for her in New York. We were going to fly back together Sunday afternoon, but I got a phone call from Irwin Winkler, who was producing a movie called The Net. It was to be the first popular-culture representation of the Internet, and I wanted every opportunity to put the right spin on the ball.
So I agreed to meet with him that day in Los Angeles, which meant I would have to take the red-eye back to New York that night rather than flying with Cynthia. She wanted to delay her flight to accompany me, but I said, “Look, you’ve been sick and you’ve got patients to see tomorrow. Why don’t you just take the afternoon flight? And then I’ll be home to see you in time for us to make love before you go off to work in the morning.”
Those were the days when you could still walk with someone right to the gate at LAX. When we said goodbye to each other there, we enjoyed one of our customarily shameless kisses and she said, “We were made for each other, baby. Nothing can keep us apart.” Then she bounded down the Jetway as full of life as anyone I’d ever seen.
After getting on the plane, she took a nap. When the flight attendant tried to wake Cynthia up to tell her to put on her seat belt as they came into JFK, she was dead. The one thing that could have proved her last words false had happened.
I later learned that she had an underlying genetic predisposition that allowed that virus to unweave her heart muscle. When you get the flu, you ache, because a virus is literally disassembling your DNA. It was viral cardiomyopathy. Had it been bacterial, they could have done something about it, but at that stage of the game, probably the only thing that would have saved her would have been an immediate heart transplant.
When I arrived home in the cold gray dawn, Cynthia was not there. There was plenty of evidence indicating her chaotic departure but none that she had returned. I started to call a few friends to see if they had heard anything, and there was a fellow intern from Beth Israel who said that she had received a mysterious phone call at home in the middle of the night from the Jamaica Hospital Medical Center in Queens asking if she knew Cynthia.
She said she did, but they wouldn’t tell her what was up. So I immediately called the emergency room there and was told that yes, Cynthia Horner had been there but that she had been moved to Queens General Hospital. I then battled though an incredibly convoluted phone tangle asking if anybody had heard of this case. All the time I was on hold during these phone transfers, Muzak was playing Pachelbel’s Canon in D, which set a certain tone.
Finally, I got somebody who said she knew about Cynthia. She then put the phone down and I heard her call out to someone else in the room, “What time did she expire?” And my world went flying. I told her there had to be a mistake, because there was no conceivable way that the woman I was looking for had expired. But no, they had positive ID on her and all that remained was for me to come down and identify the body in the morgue.
I called a mobster patient that Cynthia had, and he drove me out there. As it turned out, her skin didn’t look so bad without her in it. But I felt like my own heart had been amputated. I felt like Moses might have if he had been given a year in the Promised Land before being kicked back out into the desert. There is really no way to say this without sounding incredibly sappy, but we were the same soul.
In terms of telling her family about us, Cynthia had been very secretive, which was kind of ironic given the way I felt about secrecy on the Internet. But none of them knew about the two of us. Shortly before she died, Cynthia had gone home for Easter and told her father about what had happened with her and Diego, but no one else in the family knew a thing.
After I determined that it really was Cynthia’s body in the morgue, it was incumbent upon me to call her parents. I woke up her mother and said, “You don’t know me and you’re going to wish you didn’t,” and then I told her what had happened. Fortunately, her parents were extraordinarily graceful. Her father said that he had never seen her as happy as she had been during the year we had been together. He’d had no idea what to make of it but now understood, and so he exonerated me.
Cynthia’s service was held on Friday, April 22, 1994, in a small church in Nanaimo. About 250 people came; she was a real star as far as they were concerned. Nobody knew who I was, but I delivered the only eulogy. I still don’t know why the family let me do it.
I began by saying, “I don’t know most of you, and I envy the many among you who were graced with Cynthia all her short life. I only knew her a little while. We spent this last glorious year together. It was the best year of my life and, I firmly believe, it was the best year of her life, too….
“I don’t know that I believe in the supernatural, but I do believe in miracles and our time together was filled with the events of magical unlikelihood. I also believe that angels, or something like them, sometimes live among us, hidden within our fellow human beings. I’m convinced that such an angel dwelled in Cynthia. I felt this presence often in Cynthia’s lightness of being, in her decency, her tolerance, her incredible love. I never heard Cynthia speak ill of anyone, nor did I ever hear anyone speak ill of her. She gave joy and solace to all who met her.
“I feel her angel still, dancing around the spiritual periphery, just beyond the sight of my eyes, narrowed as they are with tears and the glare of ordinary light. Her graceful goodness continues to surround me, if less focused and tangible than before.
“With a care both conscious and reverential, Cynthia and I built a love which I believe inspired most who came near it….We wanted to make our union into a message of hope, and I believe we did, even though we knew that hearts opened so freely can be shattered if something should go wrong. As my heart is shattered now.
“So among the waves of tragedy which have crashed on me with her death is a terror that our message of hope has been changed into a dreadful warning. But I must tell you that had I known in the beginning that I would be here today doing this terrible thing, I would still have loved her as unhesitatingly, because true love is worth any price one is asked to pay.
“The other message we wished to convey was one of faith in the essential goodness and purpose of life. I have always felt that no matter how inscrutable its ways and means, the universe is working perfectly and working according to a greater plan than we can know.
“In the last few days, I have had to battle with the fear that everything is actually just random, that the universe is a howling void of meaningless chaos, indifferent to everything that I value. All hope has at times seemed unjustified to me.
“But groundless hope, like unconditional love, is the only kind worth having. Its true name is faith. As it is a shallow faith which goes untested, so it is that if we can keep our faith through this terrible test, we will emerge with a conviction of enduring strength. And this faith will become Cynthia’s greatest gift to us. If we can build with our lives a monument to her light, her gameness, and her love, she will not have died in vain, and her death will become as much a miracle as was her life.”
What I said had a big effect on a lot of people. One of the things I discovered, even though I had known this before in some abstract way but hadn’t ever really focused on it, was how completely fucked up America is in regard to death and mourning. You don’t die in America without losing. You lost your battle with death. And so it’s considered to be an act of weakness, which makes it difficult to accept the second most common thing in life.
When my mother was ninety-four years old and had cancer for the third time, she had Mormon relatives coming into her hospital room in Salt Lake City saying, “You can beat this thing, Mim. You’re a fighter.” Such horseshit. As a consequence, people don’t feel they have permission to mourn. Stiff upper lip and they go on. That was not an option for me. I had been hit so hard I had to mourn, and I was doing it completely involuntarily. I had no choice at all.
Even though it was still in the early days of the Internet, what I had written about Cynthia, including my eulogy for her, went viral. My God, I got probably five megabytes of emails from all over the world, most of them saying that they now felt like they had been given permission to mourn and were grateful to me for that. Some of these even came from people who had lost someone years before, and finally understood how they could now feel as bad as they still did. Although this was comforting for me to know, it did nothing to alleviate my grief.
After Cynthia died, I was forced to decide whether the universe was senseless and cruel or actually had a purpose. And I realized the physical world exists so that love can make sense, because without the frame of fear and doubt and suffering, love is effortless and meaningless. I believed that we volunteer our souls to come into the physical world so that we can do battle with fear.
Nonetheless, the pain got so bad for a while that if I stopped moving, I couldn’t stand it. And so I fell into a lifestyle of continuous motion. Over the course of the following year, I flew more than 270,000 miles on just one airline. The stratosphere became my church. Whenever I was up there, I felt like I was closer to her.
During this period, I would suddenly—and surprisingly, even to myself—break into a conflagration of weeping. You could spontaneously combust and cause less consternation than if you’re a full-grown man who suddenly bursts into tears while sitting next to some guy in business class on a plane. Knowing I could cry there whenever the urge hit me, I decided to go into rehab.