Homesick (22 page)

In January, just as life finally seemed to be getting somewhat back to normal, I began to realize that I’d soon be facing another change in my life. For three years I’d been playing the role of a lifetime as an actress—and now it looked as though that wonderful gift was about to be withdrawn.

After
Sisters
ended its six-year run in the late 1990s, I came out of that show knowing I had earned my chops, and certain I would still be in the running for starring film roles. Wrong. One of the first things I did post-
Sisters
was audition for a femme fatale role in the James Bond movie
Tomorrow Never Dies.
I thought things went terrifically well with the director. Then my manager called to give me the news.

“Sela, I don’t know how to tell you this,” he said, “but the director told me, ‘What I really want is Sela Ward ten years ago.’ ”

I was thirty-nine. I’d never felt more sexy and more confident as a woman, and more ready as an actress. Yet as I quickly discovered, if you were over thirty-five, you weren’t any of those things as far as Hollywood is concerned. Once again, I was being told that the only thing that mattered was my looks. Crushed, I went up to Santa Barbara on retreat to nurse my wounded ego. As I sat soaking in a bathtub, reading an article on why women lie about their age after thirty-five, I came across the story of a postmenopausal woman in the Midwest, who still kept tampons in her desk so people would think she was younger. It was an awful story, but I thought:
Thank God—I’m not the only one worrying about my age
.

Just as I reached the age of forty—and just as I was becoming convinced that my Hollywood career might be losing steam, I was handed the best-written TV script I’d ever read. It was for a new show called
Once & Again,
and one of its lead roles was a character named Lily Sammler, a divorced forty-year-old mother of two daughters taking a second chance at love. As much as I didn’t want to go back to doing an hourlong television series,
Once & Again
had me from the first page of the pilot script. I knew Lily, I adored Lily, and at some level, I
was
Lily. Happily, Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, the show’s creators, agreed, and cast me in the role.

We debuted in the fall of 1999. The critics loved us. Unfortunately, not enough viewers did. ABC moved the show around on its schedule constantly, hoping to find an audience, but by the middle of the third season it became obvious that the ratings were never going to be what we’d all hoped. By the spring of 2002, there were whispers on the set that the show was in serious trouble.

Truth to tell, I had mixed feelings about the show coming to an end. I loved Lily more than any other character I’d played. As exhilarating as my work on
Sisters
had been, I had never given myself so wholly to the art of acting until I began work on
Once & Again.
But the ongoing concern about ratings was draining, a constant distraction: here I was, sure that I was doing the best acting of my career, and all the while I knew I was about to lose this wonderful role, this intelligently written and deeply felt character, because not enough people were tuning in to keep it going.

And there was another consideration. In those three years I gave so much creative effort on-screen (and on the set) to this new family, this group of writers and directors and producers and fellow actors who all pulled together to tell this story every week. I had tapped into a real flow of positive energy, and given my all to the cast and crew I considered my second family.

But at the same time I knew all along, every early morning when I left for work and every late night I came home, that all that energy might have gone elsewhere—not to Lily Sammler’s family, but to my own. I worried about that. And in my heart I wanted it to be over.

Then, at the end of January, I picked up the phone and there was Jenna’s voice. She was sobbing.

“Sela, Mama’s really sick,” she said. “She’s in the hospital, and she didn’t feel like talking on the phone. You know how she
always
wants to talk. Daddy told me, ‘Jenna, she’s fighting hard, but this is too much. I don’t think she’s going to make it.’ Sela, he started crying.” Our daddy doesn’t cry.

We’d been through this before. Mama had been seriously ill for nine years or so, and had cheated death more times than I care to recall, usually with all of the kids at her side. But no matter how sick Mama had been in the past, Daddy always insisted she was going to pull through. This time was different.

The producers were gracious enough to charter us a plane, even rearranging my shooting schedule to allow me till Sunday to be with Mama. I gathered up my brother Brock, who also lives in L.A., and together we headed home, arriving in Meridian at four o’clock the next morning.

When we reached Mama’s bedside, it was obvious that she was in a lot of pain. Her lungs were failing. She’d had lung episodes in the past, but after a brief hospital stay for treatment she usually felt good enough that she’d be back in action a couple days later. Not this time. The steroids the doctors gave her had made her bones brittle, and they were beginning to fracture, causing her frightful pain. The lung specialist had talked with Daddy and Jenna outside Mama’s room the night before. She had about a month to live, he told them, and the doctors needed to know whether we wanted Mama revived if her lungs should give out.

Jenna filled me in. “If we wanted her to be revived, he said, they could do it. But it would be rough, and probably break some of her bones. I told him I didn’t want her to go through that. He said he’d make sure everyone knew that.”

Brock, Jenna, Daddy, and I took turns sitting with Mama. Berry had his hands full at work, and couldn’t spend as much time with her as he might have wanted; but then, as her one child who’d stayed behind in Mississippi, he’d always been there for her. I think he was relieved that his three siblings had come to help him shoulder the burden.

Those next few days were difficult. There was a constant parade of family and friends through Mama’s hospital room, and it was unnerving to watch as she smoked (yes) and held court, pretending she wasn’t going to die. Some days she’d be laughing so uproariously you’d look at her and think,
She’s going to be fine.
But the truth was, she knew as clear as day what was happening, and we knew just as surely that she couldn’t handle it. It was frightening enough for us to confront the thought that this was the end. But the vision of our headstrong Mama refusing to acknowledge the fact that she was going to die, was almost too much to bear.

We called everyone who was close to Mama—her brother in Tennessee; her best friend, Betty; her niece in Jackson and her kids; my aunt in Birmingham and her daughter—and told them that this was it, that they needed to come say goodbye.

Jenna decided to call Tom Sikes, a new minister at First Christian Church, and ask his advice. We’d never met this new pastor before, but all we knew to do was reach out in Mama’s time of need. Mama was very sick, Jenna told him; she needed to talk with someone about dying, but it wasn’t going to be any of us. Maybe he could come around and see if he could help.

Later that day my sister brought Daddy home from the hospital, and when she returned to Mama’s room the handsome young pastor stood up to greet her. “Hi. I’m talking to your mother about death,” Tom said.

“Okay. Well, I’ll just go get a Coke and come right back,” Jenna said.

By the time she returned Mama and Tom were laughing and joking, just as she always did. He stayed about an hour. When Jenna showed him out, he took her into the hallway.

“Your mama said, ‘I’m going to walk the road I’m on, and I’m going to need your help,’ “ he told her. At last a concession; at last a request for support. We all breathed a sigh of relief.

Mama could never have told us kids directly what she was going through. She had spent too many years trying to protect us. But Tom Sikes was there for just that reason. He’d lost his own family, I learned later; he’d addressed death firsthand, and he knew what language to use.

One night, as Mama lay dying, Jenna and I had an intimate talk with Daddy. He told us why certain things had happened the way they had in the life of our family—things he and Mama had endured but kept from us children, for our own peace of mind. They had suffered for each other and from each other, he told us, but they had endured. At last he could no longer keep up his façade; he wept not just for Mama, but for his cousin James who died in the war, for his Aunt Margaret, and for years of unreleased tears. It was a moment of mercy, and we all wept with thanks.

At last Mama’s family started arriving; though not one of us said so, we all knew the time was coming near. Jenna kept a diary of Mama’s last days, and she recorded the aunts’ and cousins’ visits faithfully. “When I saw all her relatives coming,” she wrote, “I just further understood that everything is in order. She is saying goodbye. Dear Lord, I need not worry, I know you are doing everything and I appreciate the beauty of all of this, as I find it so hard.”

Sitting by our mother’s bedside, Jenna also wrote: “Oh little, little one. You are so tiny. You are so sweet. So courageous. So strong. I wish you didn’t have to be so strong. I wish you could just be taken care of. I wish your lungs were strong again. I wish I could have been closer . . . maybe your friend. I pray that your lungs will quietly take you away and that cancer doesn’t ravage your body to the end. I guess you’re blessed that the cancer will not eat you away. But what is it like to drown in your own lungs? Peaceful, I hope. I wish you would sleep. Thank you, Mama, for everything. I am grateful. There is so much grace. There is so much grace.”

That night, Jenna and I huddled on either side of the bed in Mama’s room, talking and laughing with her on into the deep of night. Mama stopped at one point, looked at us, and said, “Isn’t this fun, just the three of us here together?” It was as if we were all hunkered down at the farm, telling stories in the middle of a winter storm. At one point, Mama’s mood seemed light enough that Jenna felt able to take a chance. So she turned to Mama, and told her she could leave us whenever she felt ready. “You mean kick the bucket?” Mama laughed sassily, all Bette Davislike.

The next day, after breakfast, I was due to return to L.A. to resume filming. Leaving my mother’s bedside after four emotionally charged days was one of the most painful things I’ve ever had to do. I took her face in my hands, savored her sweet smell, and told her, “I’ll be back, Mama. I promise.”

“I know you will,” she whispered. “I know you will.”

That made one of us. On Monday morning I showed up back at work, determined to find it within me to remain professional despite the state of my heart. But I was haunted by my promise.
What if I don’t get back before she dies? What if she dies this week, while we’re filming?
Mama had to hang on until the weekend. I so needed to be with her as she breathed her last breath. I was in a horrible position.

But what could I do? The
Once & Again
producers had been marvelous in accommodating my needs for time off during my mother’s last days. They had generously chartered the first plane home, and spent several days shooting scenes around my character. They had done everything they could for me, but now they were hard up against the reality that nothing more could be done on the program without me. Had I stayed in Mississippi past the weekend, production would have had to shut down at the cost of $80,000 a day. I would just have to deal with the guilt, and pray to God for just a few more days of life for Mama.

I pushed myself through those days, nerves frayed, exhausted and distracted. I stayed in constant touch with Jenna, and she told me Mama was getting weaker and weaker. I would go to my trailer to cry. I prayed: “God, please help me. I don’t know what to do.” I needed to be there at the end, but nobody could say when that would be—days or weeks or longer. She had come back from the brink so many times before.