Transcript

The End of the Road | Blaise Zerega | TEDxDanubia

[Music] 100 people I'm also going to tell you how he killed himself and in doing so he taught me the importance of living well and dying well and believe me when I tell you that you're only fully alive when you're aware of death and that even if as Mr Aubrey deg gray says for able to live longer what matters to me is my relationship to death all right I'm a journalist so let's get started with our story 20 years ago I was a young newspaper reporter living in Virginia it was during the summer that I received a news tip someone told me that there's a famous writer named William McMahon and he's checked himself into a hotel room he's got cancer you've got to go talk to him you got to get his story apparently he' been B born in Germany um he' been a member of the Hitler Youth as a child his family fled to America before the outbreak of World War II and then he returned to Germany as a US Marine to fight and now according to my source he was in a hotel room waiting to die I also must confess that I knew this was just going to be a great story for the newspaper you I was a journalist and this is it what what was a man with an Irish name doing you know being born in Germany what did it mean to go back to Germany against his homeland maybe to encounter his friends and family on the battlefield it just felt like it had all the makings of a great newspaper story but I also confess a deeper curios osity I wanted to know what it was like to die I wanted to ask him not in some abstract way what's it like to die but really when death is at your door would this man whose name I believe was McMahon would he be stoic would he be afraid um was he resigned to it was he in denial what would it be like was was the end of his road going to be since he's in a hotel room just ordering room service and drinking a bottle of wine and vodka and steaks and desserts and just going out with a a big splash no none of that proved true everything I thought I knew about him was false and everything I thought that I knew about death and dying was also false so I went and I knocked on the hotel room door I was greeted not by a broad shouldered Burly war hero type this man was tall and thin his name was not William McMahon I had the wrong name William mackinley was his name he had blue eyes smile always smoking he lit a cigarette invited me into his room but I knew that something was wrong with him his throat was swollen and would get even more swollen in the months ahead he was a chain smoker and he had Advanced throat cancer his doctor had given him one year to live one year ago and his skin already was s had this yellow poar kind of Ghostly and as I was speaking to him I could barely even hear him he agreed to be interviewed but warned me that his voice would soon disappear and over the next two weeks I managed three interviews with him that I was able to capture on audio tape before his voice went all but silent he would whisper like this and so we would communicate with hand gestures I wrote him questionnaires which he answered uh and then eventually pad and paper and that's how we communicated so I want to tell you the story that he told me about his own life he was born in 1932 in New York City his mother was American his father Irish English he had a brother one year younger and neither William nor his brother would die from natural causes in the late 30s his father returned to London for military service he was a royal Air Force engineer sent to Singapore World War II breaks out he is captured by the Japanese he spends the duration of the war in a horrific notorious Japanese p camp being tortured beat abused on a nearly daily basis meanwhile 1940 London the London Blitz starts the lofw bombing months of bombing every night air raid sirens people panicked in the streets William was 9 years old and was his job to get his mother and his younger brother into the shelter every night William's mother could not cope she began drinking Jin drinking heavily one night she refuses to go into the shelter They begged her they pleaded with her please Mommy please they wouldn't she wouldn't go in the morning the boys returned to their home a bomb had fallen and they discovered her Twisted mangled corpse in the rubble her last words had been tell Mr Hitler he can go to bloody hell William and his brother were sent away William was sent to New York to live with his mother's family brother was sent to Ireland to live with his father's family it was a move to protect them but it was a move that would turn disastrous William ended up in a street gang stabbed Somebody went to reform school jail for kids um his brother got mixed up as a pre-teen with the IRA the Irish revolutionary Army may even have participated in some gun battles and bombings after the war ended his father was released from the PW Camp went through a series of military hospitals the boys are summoned they return expecting for a happy reunion with their father not to be he's a shell of a man he can't even get out of bed he's completely just ravaged um and he died a few weeks later from the culmination of all the beatings and wounds and infection that he had received now it's important you understand these details of his life so you understand where I'm going with this my purpose at now was being to change summer was becoming fall I was not a newspaper reporter anymore in fact I was becoming his friend his char caregiver I would visit him every day in the morning I would stop in and check on him I'd go to work I'd check on him again at night the cancer was progressing rapidly and he had few treatment options he did not want to die in a hospital like his father he wanted to die in the hotel room he wanted to die facing the end of the road head on I would visit him daily I'd go to the grocery store I'd get him milk apple sauce oatmeal he could not swallow solid food um fruit pies uh oh and cigarettes oh cigarettes he was a Winston 100 man two packs a day not just one pack near the end it was up to two packs uh the cold milk would soothe his throat the oatmeal gave him the nutrition and the cets gave him pleasure now after his father died William was very angry in his own words he told me he was full of murderous rage he had a real desire for violence so he returns to America en lists in the United States Marine Corps and goes to Korea he join to to fight there he spends three years he achieves the rank of a sergeant early in the war he falls in love on leave with a Japanese prostitute in Kyoto the the country that had killed his father every time he went on leave he'd go visit her she had her family had a centuries old samurai sword which she gives him for protection many of the battles in the Korean War involved trench warfare and the Chinese soldiers would employ a technique that he called a pylon a lot of them would take drugs or get drunk drunk on wine and they' charge they' amass hundreds of soldiers and just charge a single point of the trench line knowing full well that those in front would be mowed down just slaughtered but the idea was that enough bodies would fall into the trench that they could overrun the line split the lines williiam took the samurai sword and defended against these assaults with the sword he killed 76 enemy soldiers he killed dozens more with his machine gun and with his rifle he was wounded several times he received three purple hearts a bronze star and other medals and commendations for Valor after the Korean War he enrolled at baleal College at Oxford University he studied fine art painting he met the American poets wh Ain and Robert Frost here he felt alive he said for the first time he was really really just enjoying it he was using his brain he was using his heart he was using his creativity he also fell in love with girl his age that she was wonderful she also discovered that he had been keeping a log of kills as he called it each of the 76 enemy soldiers that he had hacked and slashed and stabbed he'd recorded in a journal sometimes even taking their photos she destroyed that log William was confused in his own words he didn't know what to make of all the Death that he had seen and all the Death that he had caused so he answered those questions of death with more death he joins the French Foreign Legion and fights in Tangier morocc in Spain then finally in the 1960s he meets up with his brother New Zealand his brother is also a mercenary now William is exhausted he's not exhausted from Life he's exhausted from Death he's exhausted from killing inspired by Paul Goan he begins painting again he sails around the South Seas painting beautiful canvases of domestic life he moves back to America has an opening at a famous New York City gallery to smash success he begins to think maybe he could make a living as a painter maybe he should do this but if feels too abstract too it's just not specific enough so he moves to San Francisco he decides to write a novel based on his life and there he exchanges poetry with Gregory corso and Alan Ginsburg he paints with Lawrence ferling Getti he meets Jack kowak and according to William they thought he was an uptight Englishman he they were hippies and wore casual clothes he wore a suit they smoked pot and drank wine he sipped tea they laughed and caroused he scribbled and sketched and and sat alone he publishes his Masterpiece it's called a sense of dark he uses a sum because it's so real to life the narrator is based on him he changes his name from Baal College he drops an M over the B William Mel um the critics it's published a critical Acclaim the New Yorker calls it a novel of almost intolerable intensity uh it's a bestseller and it remains today one of the top novels about the Korean War but then after the success of the book William wasn't sure what to do next he was his creativity gone he'd purged himself of all these experiences he got a steady job he got married he got divorced he kept writing and painting he moved around he got another job so on in 1980s he he publishes a second novel in that same year that his brother was murdered his brother became a CI agent and was executed in Bogota Columbia like the book's narrator William told me that he' become an angel of death it's a truism to say that he found art but he had painting the island people writing about death he' exercised it from his life and he was able now he told me that he was able to live life with a full Embrace of death living with that full knowledge that death is a part of life and so that summer 20 years ago when I met him in Virginia he was back he was an ordinary man he was working as the editor of a financial publication however he wasn't just ordinary because because he was dying of cancer his condition was worsening he was growing very weak he was having trouble standing he couldn't breathe um his throat was now enlarged past his chin something was wrong the doctor had told him he had only a few weeks left before he'd have to go into the hospital William what's wrong I asked he paused lights another cigarette waves me over I sit next to him on the hotel room bed he whispers in my ear I want you to help me kill myself no I said I stood up I moved away he said it again I want you to help me kill myself no I said we argued for the next several weeks for every objection I raised he had a rebuttal he had thought it through this was not an impulsive decision and my first reaction was to talk him out of it no no no life is sacred it's against the law I called a doctor I called a lawyer I called a suicide hotline I called his friends you know we can't let him do this we can't let him do this but he wanted to do it he wanted to face his death his end of the road head on but we were running out of time we running out of time for two reasons one his cancer the throat was here now the cancer spread up his jaw into his ear totally swollen Mo moreover inspired by his life I had decided to move to San Francisco and write a novel and I had to leave at the end of the month um and I and I began to worry did he have the courage to kill himself before I moved away I know I didn't have the courage to help him do it and I no long but I no longer disagreed with his decision and as I would learn in the days ahead he had enough courage for both of us he had obtained a book called Final Exit it's a suicide guide It's a manual of how to kill your to kill yourself covers all the methods hanging Hemlock gun gunshot uh William decided that he would overdose on sleeping pills will you help me get the pills no I said will you help me get the pills no I said I I just refused to do it Final Exit also warned that if you take too many sleeping pills you may lose Consciousness and then vomit up the pills so to rec to so to prevent that from happening after you swallow the pills take a plastic bag put it over your head and put a rubber band around your throat you'll suffocate will you help me will you put a plastic bag over my head William a dead band the rubber band won't fit around your throat he laughed I laughed true Gallows humor um really if I take the pills will you place the plaster pag over my head again no I said no I'm not going to help you do this and this time he did not argue he understood my position and I understood his as the end of the road came near William could no longer swallow he was starving to death he was surviving only on liquids and cigarettes the skin was stretched very tight everything was swollen disfigured everything was shutting down and our conversations became more intense more powerful even more emotional than ever and then finally that afternoon he wrote today is the day will you come back tonight after work yes I said so I was a wreck at work that day I was very sad very scared I didn't know I was scared about what I was going to have to do that night but I actually didn't know what I was going to have to do that night I didn't know what death would be like I didn't know how I would how I would would face it and when I got there he showed me he had everything planned he had the bottle of sleeping pills he had a glass of milk he had a plastic bag he had a rubber band he had a cremation policy a suicide note and a big stack of dollar bills for the hotel staff who was going to find his body so we sat together sat together for hours that night I held his hand thre my arm around him we watched TV we hugged he made me vow to come back in the morning and find his body finally around mid night he said it's time for you to go guess I said say goodbye and that night I cried and I cried I looked up in the night sky and I I promise you I saw the Stars I saw the planets I saw comets I saw so many comets that night and the next morning I went to his hotel room door I listened outside the door it was silent I let myself in open the door I walked in and he was alive he was sitting on the bed smoking I couldn't believe it I William you're alive you didn't do it and he was so sad but I was so happy he was mad and I was happy and he was scared and I was still happy you know what happened what Happ why didn't you do it and he explained that he had been worried that he would not be successful that he would fail in his attempt he also admitted that he wasn't afraid of death but he was afraid of dying will you come back tonight he asked and now I was leaving for San Francisco the next morning of course I was going to come back yes I said when I got there we talked this is our last conversation and he told me that it dawned on him that he didn't want to be alone that was the the chief reason he wanted me to be there and you know he said we're [ __ ] up about death what what what how bad can it get it was the dying that bothered him and he was well prepared he had his checklist he the lethal dosage of secol the sleeping pill he was about to take his 30 tablets the final legs of book recommended 40 and he had 60 of them he took each of those 60 capsules he just opened them up one at a time poured the the the powder into his glass of chocolate milk he stirred it all up getting them down would be the most difficult part he didn't want to swallow he was having he didn't want to vomit he was terrible swalling and I was Grim I was crying I was I was you know silent just tears in my eyes and he says you know I feel sorry for you I said no don't feel sorry for me you know it's about you you know don't feel sorry for me and then you know he was empathetic we just looked at each other and there was just it was I don't know it was he drank it down he just did it he drank it down and he wrote you know this is simple this is going to be clean you know this is good his last sentence that he wrote was stay with me until I doze off his eyes fluttered I looked at him started fall asleep his breathing breathing became the breathing of a sleeping person I waited and then I left the room and the next morning I didn't sleep I got up in the dark thre my duffel bag and boxes in this car I had to drive cross country started a long drive from Virginia to California I didn't know if William had been successful or not I didn't know I it was I think it was in Tennessee or someplace I I pulled over I took a stack of quarters this is pay phone days no mobile phones I called up a friend of his at work and I said said please go check on William go call the hotel someone has to go check on him just find out I didn't know if he was alive or dead and I drove the rest of the day put another gas tank of gas in the car and I drove and I called back and I learned that yes he had killed himself he had done it and I was neither happy nor sad I I didn't know what to feel I just knew that he was happy that he had faced his end of the road head on and so I'd like to ask you the questions I had asked at the very beginning of myself when I first met him you know are you living your life fully what is your relationship to death before William killed himself he wrote something he said promise me you will tell our story and now 20 years later today I have finally publicly for the first time and so let me ask you the same question that William asked me more than 20 years ago will you promise to tell our story thank [Applause] [Music] you