Page 29 of All the Way to the River

T hey gave her six months to live.

It was April.

She would definitely be gone by Christmas, they said.

“When the end comes, it’ll come fast,” one of the doctors explained, when Rayya asked for the non-sugarcoated truth about how it would all go down.

“That’s how it is with pancreatic and liver cancer at such an advanced stage.

You won’t be incapacitated for months and months, though.

If you let the cancer take its course, you’ll be able to live your life for a while, walking and talking and seeming relatively fine—and then all your organs will begin to shut down quite suddenly.

There will be some pain toward the end, but we’ll make sure you don’t suffer. ”

Of course, the doctor added, the cancer could be treated . If Rayya wanted to go that route, there were chemotherapies that could slow the growth of the tumors and perhaps extend her life for a few years—but there would be no cure. And then she would be constantly sick from the chemo itself.

Rayya rejected this option completely: “No chemo, no radiation, no surgery, no hospitals. No life-extending measures. I don’t mind dying of cancer, but I refuse to be a cancer patient for the rest of my life.”

I was amazed by her fortitude and her certainty, but then I was always amazed by Rayya. How very like her, to face death without flinching!

But the real and perhaps strangest truth was this: After Rayya got over the initial shock of her diagnosis, she actually rather liked the idea of the sudden death the doctors were promising her if the cancer was left untreated.

She liked the drama of it, the intensity of it, the swiftness of it.

Most of all, she liked the freedom she felt this was bringing to her life.

I don’t know whether it’s a normal reaction for somebody to experience a sense of euphoria after receiving a death sentence, but Rayya certainly did.

I don’t know whether there is even such a thing as a “normal reaction” to a terminal cancer diagnosis—but Rayya’s response to the prospect of six months of life followed by a sudden death was a vivid, wild exuberance.

She hid this exuberance at first from other people, because her friends and family were still reeling from the news of her diagnosis and she didn’t want to freak them out.

But when we were alone together, she let fly an unrestrained ecstasy at the clarity, the simplicity, of what she had been told by the doctors.

“Everyone spends their lives wondering how they’re gonna die,” she said, “and now I get to know? That’s amazing! It’s done, it’s settled. Why do I feel like this is such great news? It just makes everything so easy .”

Then she would launch into a rapturous list of all the things she never had to do again, or worry about, knowing she would be dead in six months.

She never again had to worry about what she ate or how much she weighed.

She didn’t have to worry about those cigarettes she could never quit smoking and what they were doing to her lungs.

She didn’t have to work anymore or feel bad that she never went to the gym.

She could stop stressing out over not having any retirement savings.

She never had to endure another Pap smear or mammogram, or get the oil changed in her car, or go to the dentist, or worry about her credit rating, or deal with annoying people, or think about climate change, or care who won the presidential election.

She never had to get old, or worry about who would take care of her then.

She never again had to feel the heavy Monday-morning dread and low-grade depression that seemed to be a normal part of her life.

She was a little sad, she admitted, about having to miss the conclusion of Game of Thrones , but she could get over that.

She didn’t have to do anything now except, in her own words, “live my life to the max, man, and then flame the fuck out.”

In other words, she didn’t have to do anything now except what she wanted to do—which had always been her dream, anyway.

And what Rayya wanted to do with the rest of her life—now that she knew her “expiration date,” as she kept calling it—was to spend every minute she could with me, to make as much music as she could, to eat a bunch of incredible meals with her friends and family, to go on some fabulous trips (she dreamed of California, France, South Africa, and Fire Island), and to spend every last dime of her money.

Spurred by how brief and precious was her remaining time on earth, she doubled down on her creativity, and I did all I could to support her dreams and visions.

I rented music studios in both Detroit and New York so we could record some songs she had written long ago and other songs that we had written together—love songs, songs of joy and sorrow.

She got a gig at Joe’s Pub reading some of her work before a delighted audience, and we looked into renting a theater in downtown New York so we could produce, on the fly, a one-woman show of music and stories about her life.

She made arrangements to speak to female inmates at Rikers Island, where she had once been imprisoned, wanting to instill them with a sense of their own value and possibility.

(“This jail cell is not where you live and it’s not who you are,” she assured them.

“Your mind is where you live, and your heart is who you are. If you’re peaceful inside your mind and good inside your heart, that’s all that matters. ”)

I started carrying a notebook around with me everywhere, writing down everything she said and did—greedy to somehow collect her, even as she was on her way out.

Others were eager to collect her, as well.

Early that summer, we met a British filmmaker named Marc Francis.

He’d been working on a documentary about death and dying, and he asked if he could shoot a few scenes from Rayya’s life as she was facing terminal cancer.

Rayya happily agreed. But once Marc had spent an afternoon following her around with a camera, he decided to jettison his earlier vision for the project and focus the film entirely upon her .

“It’s just that she’s so charismatic,” he said.

“And her courage and humor about death is amazing. I love the brazenness of her refusal to get medical treatment and to just live instead. Anyway, it’s not like the audience will be paying much attention to the other characters in the film, once they meet Rayya. ”

Believe me, I understood completely.

Rayya was so excited that a filmmaker wanted to document her death, you might have thought she’d won the lottery.

“This is so fucking cool, Marc!” she kept saying every time he pulled out his camera. “Just record everything, dude. I don’t give a shit what people see.”

Maybe it was because Rayya had already “died” so many times as a drug addict—flatlining in one overdose after another—that the news of her impending mortality did not much frighten her at first. (“I’ve been dead before,” she explained, “and it’s not that big a deal.

” As one of her oldest song lyrics went: “My faith to keep me warm / died more times than I was born.”)

When I think back upon it now, I wonder if it was the prospect of relief from pain that filled Rayya with this sudden sense of purpose, creativity, and soaring ebullience.

Not relief from the pain of cancer, which she was not yet experiencing, but a promise that soon she would be relieved from the pain of life —from the pain that had driven her toward heroin in the first place and that had sent her back to drinking in recent years.

Life can feel difficult for everyone, but addicts suffer the anguish of existence at a level that feels truly unbearable.

People don’t stick needles in their arms and pump themselves full of mind-erasing drugs for no reason, after all.

And the thing Rayya had always loved about heroin was the way it eliminated her from consciousness—how it allowed her to discard her entire identity, as if her “self” were some heavy old overcoat she didn’t need to wear anymore and could just throw to the floor in a crumpled heap.

The only problem with heroin was that you had to come back from the high.

You had to wake up, stand up, put the overcoat back on.

That had always been heartbreaking for her.

But soon she could leave the world without ever coming back.

“Let’s just blaze out,” she said, her eyes brilliant with an elation I had never before witnessed in her. “All the way to the river, baby, all the way to the river. Let’s just live balls to the wall until I die!”

Enthusiastically, fervently, grandly, I agreed to it all.

I wasn’t the only one in Rayya’s circle who came along on this ride.

There were a few other family members and friends, some of her exes, and a handful of our fellow artists and creators who also got caught in the upswell of consequence-free excitement that Rayya’s death sentence had suddenly unleashed.

“Do you remember all those glittering nights, at the very beginning?” Rayya’s nephew Sami asked me recently, recalling the early days of Rayya’s cancer diagnosis.

“Do you remember all those nights we went out to Sid Gold’s piano bar to do karaoke?

All those incredible meals where nobody cared about the cost?

It was so gangster, the way you guys were living.

It made a big impact on everyone. It was like we all started asking, Wait—why aren’t we all making art?

Why aren’t we all spending our money while we have the chance?

Why aren’t we all singing and dancing all night?

It was like your love activated all of us. Do you remember that?”

Do I remember it?

I remember every spectacular moment of it!

What I remember most about that time is how electric I felt.

My entire body and imagination were thrumming with the prospect of living without any limits or rules whatsoever—of doing whatever the hell we wanted; of throwing off the shackles of respectability and responsibility; of burning up the last few months of Rayya’s life as her literal “ride or die” lover; of gunning through our short but intense romance with such a heightened level of passion that I truly believed we would generate enough love to last me for the rest of my life, and I would never, ever have to suffer or feel pain again (not even after she died!).

Somehow we would both be rescued, transformed, and immortalized by the sheer, blasting heat, joy, and liberation of this once-in-a-million-years love story.

Christ, it felt amazing!