Presence 2024
A small film succeeds where bigger films
failed
"For English, press one."
"Please listen carefully. Our menu options
have changed."
"Your call is important to us.
Please stay on the line and your call will be answered in the order it was
received."
"All our representatives are
helping others. We will return your call at a time convenient to us, after you have
fallen to the floor and are sobbing uncontrollably."
Some of us have lost some genetic
lottery. Cancer haunts our families. We hear these phrases when, struggling to
sound calm, we inquire about our loved ones, when we schedule ourselves, and
when we request our prognosis.
Which is worse, a cancer diagnosis or
navigating the health care steeple chase? A twenty-something girl treats you
like a slab of meat while shoving you into a big machine. God didn't gift
cancer cells with awareness. When those cells attack your body it doesn't say
anything about human nature. When a fellow human is mean to you for no good
reason as you shiver from cold, fear, and shame in your hospital gown, it gets
to you.
In November, 2024, I coped with my
latest perch on the limin between life and death as I usually do. I
wasn't taking drugs. I was cleaning, writing, hiking, bopping to great music, soaking
in hot baths, shopping for groceries, and going to the movies. These activities
are my therapy, my miracle drugs, and my best friends.
Friends? "Cancer ghosting" is a
thing. The people around you recoil from you. At first, I felt marooned. But
then I realized that their ghosting me was just nature taking its course. I was
updating my will, giving away belongings, and wondering whether I'd soon be
reunited with departed loved ones. The folks who retreated from me were,
simply, living in, and involved with, a different dispensation. They were
moving through the colorful, physical, concrete world of life, with all its
promises of tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. My friends were doing that
necessary work that we all do – investing in life while alive, and avoiding
death. Cancer ghosting can leave you feeling very alone, but as Nietzsche said,
when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you. At least the abyss
was willing to hang out with me.
In January, 2025, I was going for a walk
and listening to NPR over my headphones. When I tune in I usually hear a story
about how blacks are suffering in white supremacist America, or how gays are
suffering in homophobic America. I wait out the propaganda and listen for the quality
programming that sneaks in.
A man was speaking. He was a white guy,
older, even-tempered, quietly and intelligently witty, at home in the world and
with himself. Ghost stories, the man was
saying, are "essentially hopeful … the very premise means that there's an
afterlife. Something comes beyond" death, he said. I am intimidated by
scary movies but this guy was giving me a new way to look at them.
The man continued in a voice, that,
unlike so much I hear on NPR, was not shrill, or griping, or demanding, or
haranguing. In this same tone of voice, this man might be ordering a car part
or telling a child a bedtime story. This mature man knew that sometimes you
win, and sometimes you lose, and he recognized that it all comes out in the
wash.
"In my own life," he said, "during
periods that I would describe as traumatic, I felt more open to people around
me, and maybe had a little easier time perceiving their own difficulties or
their own pain. I wondered, if a person goes through trauma, does that open you
up to sense other things that you couldn't sense before?" He mentioned a
girl named Chloe. Chloe, he said, is "an open wound. She's been through
this horrific experience, and so she is open to the universe." It is kind,
this man was saying, to make eye contact with someone in pain and to say,
"I'm sorry that you suffer."
This man didn't have an ax to grind. He was
speaking in the most universal terms about trauma and death. He wasn't talking
about how hard it is to be black and to have a ghost in your house, or to be
trans and to go through trauma, or to be gay and to get a scary diagnosis. He
was talking about universal stuff: life, death, the space between. His speech
was not excluding, dividing, singling out for blame, or for settling scores.
His speech was inviting and truly inclusive. Such speech is rare on NPR. He
sounded the way you'd imagine a small town doctor in a Norman Rockwell painting
would sound. His words were the most soothing words I had heard in my latest
dance with death.
That man is screenwriter David Koepp. Let's
see if you've heard of the films for which he wrote the script: Jurassic
Park, Mission Impossible, Spider Man, War of the Worlds, Indiana Jones and the
Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Carlito's Way, Stir of Echoes, Ghost Town, Panic
Room, and other films. His output has earned billions of dollars worldwide.
Koepp has written the script for the 2024 film Presence, a ghost story. Well,
I'll be darned. I had sought comfort from friends, who "ghosted" me,
and from a Catholic priest, who did not have time for me. Once again, Hollywood
was coming to the rescue.
