Both of Us (23 page)

Fast-forward three months to May 2007. Redmond is back in treatment. Farrah and I are just starting to breathe again when her doctors call. The cancer is back and it’s metastasized. So much has been written of Farrah’s fight to live. Alana Stewart wrote a moving book about their experiences in those dark but meaningful months. And it’s likely you’re familiar with the documentary
Farrah’s Story
, which aired on NBC and chronicled the final two and a half years of Farrah’s life. I don’t want to repeat what’s already been covered. I want you to know what’s in here (I’m pointing at my heart). Though Farrah shared her struggle with the world, there are aspects of what she went through that have not been written about or captured on camera, moments that belonged to us alone.

It was Alana who found the clinic in Germany. The doctors there had had success with Farrah’s form of cancer in the past and were optimistic about treating her. There was one catch: the procedures would be radical and she could end up spending the time she had left suffering instead of living. She and Alana were encouraged. I was terrified. I don’t remember how soon we got on a plane to Germany, but it seems to me it was almost overnight. All during the flight, I was on edge. I needed to be there for Farrah, but I was also worried about Redmond. Though we had family friends keeping an eye on him in LA and he would be joining us in Germany soon, I continued to fear the worst. Farrah and Alana would travel back and forth to Germany six times between 2007 and 2009. I would go only twice and not because I had abandoned Farrah, as the press would cry in outrage, but because I’d promised Farrah I wouldn’t leave our son, who was also fighting for his life.

Best girlfriends Alana and Farrah on my fifty-third birthday. Alana was Farrah’s guardian angel till the very end.

It became apparent how bad off Redmond was when he arrived in Germany. Alana’s ex-husband and our dear friend, George Hamilton, accompanied him from LA. The moment I saw Red’s face, I knew. He had the eyes of an old man, and there was an emptiness that seemed to go on forever inside him. He stayed for three weeks. I barely slept. While doctors were injecting powerful toxins into Farrah’s bloodstream with needles the size of tuning forks, and she lay in bed crying, vomiting, wanting to go home, I was running between her bedside and our hotel room, making sure Redmond wasn’t using. Then I found a blackened spoon in the sink. Part of me wanted to throttle him, but I knew his was a disease every bit as insidious as his mother’s cancer. When I read my journal entries from that period, I can feel my chest tighten.

The two people I loved most on earth were both sick and every hour of every day I was reminded of how powerless I was to save either of them. I even started praying again,
pleading with God to take me instead. I existed in this tiny space in my head where disbelief, despair, hope, and rage all intersected, and sometimes I became squeezed in so tight I couldn’t breathe. That’s when Farrah’s courage, her grace in the face of life’s last mystery, and her strong faith became my oxygen. She thought I was there to give her strength, but it was she who was the provider. And though our time at the clinic was frightening, there were beautiful moments too, moments that changed the way I looked at life. I had never been around such illness before, illness that permeates a place where people come as their last hope. Most days I was so immersed in what was happening to Farrah and the ghost of what used to be my son, I didn’t possess the selflessness to notice we weren’t the only family lost in Plato’s cave.

That’s why Farrah filmed that journey, to flood the cave with light. She wanted to bring cancer and the reality of what cancer patients have to go through to the public eye. She didn’t want the side effects of chemotherapy to be hidden like some shameful secret. She wanted to show everyone the dignity behind every patient’s struggle to beat cancer. She asked Alana to film her to demystify the horrors, to confront and diminish the stigma, and to generate awareness and support for patients who can’t afford the most effective treatment and so will never know the privilege of hope. She wasn’t unlike Pope John Paul II, who courageously continued to say Mass every Sunday despite being in the advanced stages of Parkinson’s disease. When Vatican advisers began pressuring him not to appear in public because they thought it undignified for a pontiff to drool and tremble as he led the world in prayer, he refused, admonishing his advisers: “This too is part of life.” Farrah didn’t think she would die when she began the documentary. She thought it would be a testimonial to survival. Instead it would become so much more. But that spring of 2007, when Alana began videotaping, we were all still hopeful a miracle was coming.

Farrah returns home in late June visibly weakened. She will be in and out of the hospital all summer and eventually
have to return to Germany in September and then again in November for more treatments. Meanwhile, I’m doing everything I can to help Redmond navigate his perils with the law. His drug addiction has withered his character to the point where he is barely recognizable to himself or his family, and I’m afraid that soon mandated rehab won’t satisfy the courts. Redmond is stoic but underneath I know my son is scared, and he hates that he keeps disappointing his mother and me with his relapses, but we’ve tried every rehab program out there—twelve steps, fifty steps, forty turns—it doesn’t matter; they don’t work for him. And like every addict, he wants to reclaim his life, but when he reaches out his arms to grab hold of it, he trips and tumbles backward.

It was a cruel autumn. I trudged through the days, head down, trying not to lose my patience with family and friends who meant well but whose attempts to help often put me more on edge. It wasn’t that I didn’t need or want the support; I was desperate for it. But like the character Lon Chaney, Jr., played in
The Werewolf
, sometimes it was safer for everyone if I kept to myself. The Christmas holidays were overcast with the precariousness of our future. Farrah was back home, and though thin and pale, she still had that smile. It was like sunshine for me. On Christmas morning we exchanged presents. This was the card attached to her gift for Redmond, which I’ve held for safekeeping. Sometimes when I feel myself starting to lose perspective, I take it out and let her words to her son center me.

Farrah also gave me a sculpture that year. It’s a female torso with rich, sensual curves. I keep it on the mantle in my bedroom and sometimes when I hold it, I can feel her presence.

The last three lines in her letter to Redmond come from a famous bedtime story written by Robert Munsch and illustrated by Sheila McGraw titled
Love You Forever
. It’s about a mother loving her child through all the stages of growing up, from the cooing infant phase and the terrible twos all the way to adulthood. In each scene, no matter how much the boy tries the mother’s patience, she steals into his room at night after he’s asleep and holds him in her arms, whispering “I’ll love you forever. I’ll like you for always. As long as I’m living my baby you’ll be.” Farrah used to read that bedtime story to Redmond when he was a baby. She usually concluded anything she wrote to him with those words, whether it was a note tacked to the refrigerator reminding him to study for his spelling test, or one of the many long letters he received from her during his stints in rehab or jail. At the end of the bedtime story, the mother is old and dying, and the son, now a grown man, goes into her room while she’s sleeping and takes her in his arms reciting those beloved lines. Redmond would never get that chance, which is why I’ve kept every note, every letter to him from Farrah in the hope that someday when he’s ready to read them, he will feel her protective presence the same way I do when I hold that sculpture.

By January of 2008, Farrah would once again have to
travel to Germany for more procedures but she would return home within weeks. Her body was being ravaged by medical treatments intended to save her, while her cancer was growing stronger and more invasive. Her doctors anguished over what to do to give her a chance of survival. She never gave up. Her oncologists were impressed by her relentless determination to live. So as the doctors labored on, Alana, under strict instructions from Farrah, kept the video camera rolling. Farrah would not wave that white flag yet.

Back in LA, I was dealing with Redmond and doing everything I could to keep the truth from Farrah because I was afraid in her frail state, knowing her son was careening toward possible imprisonment, it would be too much for her to withstand. In the months following January of 2008, it was as if all of us were living out a play by Eugene Ionesco from the Theater of the Absurd, where nothing makes sense and the characters keep turning in circles. That January, Redmond got in trouble again; only this time, by the spring of 2009, he would find himself behind bars. Less than six months earlier, in June of 2008, Tatum would be busted in New York City for buying crack cocaine, and our family would once again be fodder for the headline hunters. And before the ink used on that story was dry, the newspapers were handed their next ugly installment. In September of 2008 the police raided my house in Malibu early one morning as part of a court-mandated check on Redmond, who was on parole. Farrah was back home by then and was sleeping
upstairs when they descended upon us. They ransacked the place, determined to unearth something, and they did. Before I went to bed the night before I had found a packet of crystal meth in Redmond’s room. He told me it wasn’t his, that he was holding it for a friend at Pepperdine, the college up the road. I know, a likely story, so I took it from him and hid it in my shoe under my bed, thinking I’d dispose of it the next morning. The police came before I had a chance. It turned out that the crystal meth was a diversionary tactic. I’d assumed that’s all Red had. The police made no such assumption. They found his stash. We would both be booked and prosecuted. Two months later, to protect Redmond, I would plead guilty to possession of crystal meth and be sentenced to attend outpatient drug management sessions. I had asserted ownership of the meth when the police first found it, thinking the court would go lighter on Redmond. In retrospect, it didn’t help him and only further sullied my reputation, if such a downgrade was possible. If all of this wasn’t so tragic, it would be funny. First the press tells the world I tried to shoot one of my kids. Then I’m the reason my daughter is on crack. And now I’m a tweeking meth addict who hides drugs in his loafers. I won’t be offended if you’re trying not to laugh. And next, I’ll be accused of “elder abuse.” That’s right. You did hear me correctly.

I call him Nevius the Devious. His real name is Craig Nevius, and he worked with Farrah on her reality series
Chasing Farrah
. Now he was supposed to be helping Alana
and Farrah transform their raw footage of Farrah’s illness into a two-hour prime-time documentary special for NBC. But soon we realized he was in over his head. It was now spring of 2009, Farrah was back home from what would be her final trip to Germany, and with every tick of the clock she was growing weaker. When Farrah, Alana, and I watched Nevius’s rough cut of the documentary, we were dumbstruck. It was amateur night. It was incoherent, badly paced, and missed the point of why Farrah wanted her illness made public. Farrah pleaded with me to step in and take over the project with Alana, and within days, at Farrah’s behest, the proper papers had been drawn and signed. Nevius went apoplectic and used the media as an instrument for his vitriol, a practice he continues to this day, and for which I have had to retain a cadre of attorneys to protect Farrah’s memory and what’s left of my once good name. Someone would actually call the police. I still don’t know who. And next thing I know, there would be an investigation of “elder abuse,” that an infirm old woman was coerced into letting me control the project. I never told Farrah that the word “elder” was used. She’d have sweet-talked her doctor into surgically removing that someone’s unholy tongue.