My Deathbed in Moonlight, at Green-Wood Cemetery

The Quiet Ticking

Before I tell you about that night in Green-Wood, there is something else. The cancer has spread to my lungs and the lymph nodes near my heart. The biopsy confirmed it. Soon I will begin something new. Most likely a clinical trial.

That quiet ticking I’ve carried since the day of my diagnosis is still there. It’s not a warning so much as a reminder: each second is a small, bright thing, passing through my hands.

Green-Wood stays with me. The centuries-old trees and the marble angels, the weather-softened obelisks that hold grief and beauty in the same breath.

Moonlight in Green-Wood

Two months ago, after a thunderstorm, the night opened to the moon. Its light lay across the carved names and gathered in their shallow letters. Beads of water still clung to the grass. The air was rich with earth. The gravestones stood close, dark against the wet grass. On the grave of a child, a Moana doll kept watch. Nearby, a neat row of toy dinosaurs stood vivid against the dark soil.

I was joined by dear friends and by my son Adrian and his girlfriend. Adrian has wandered Green-Wood with me before, but for the others it was their first time. I watched their faces turn upward toward the Gothic spires, then toward the darker paths. The night seemed to open wider with them in it.

Not Just a Visitor

Yet I was not only there to witness it. That night I had come to speak on a panel at the premiere of Embodied, an oil-pastel animated documentary by Samuel Wright Smith. In it, the terminally ill speak of their nearing deaths, lingering in that narrow seam between the life we live and the life we leave behind. My story was among them.

For most of my career, panels were transactions of expertise: conference rooms without windows, slides advancing in their blue light. The air dry with caution.

I sat stiff in chairs for hours without a hint of natural light. I spoke of war crimes. Human rights. Weapons. Conflict. Necessary work, but always at a remove from myself, my professional armor firmly in place.

This night was nothing like that. Here, death was not a subject. It was present.

Embodied premiered under a moon glowing like a lantern. Its light lay over the gravestones. The films didn’t just play. They seemed to belong to the night itself, stitched into its shadows.

Seeing my Deathbed

In one scene of Embodied, I speak about my deathbed. How I hope to leave this world. The first time I saw it on screen, I was stunned. Sam and his illustrators had turned my words into oil-pastel images. I had almost forgotten saying them, and now they returned, so vivid it felt as if the moment I spoke them and the moment I saw them were folded into one. That scene is here for you to watch, in a language beyond mine.

Collective Hands, Collective Time

The process was as beautiful as the film itself. On weekends, the illustrators gathered in a slow, shared rhythm, layering pastel on paper. For my deathbed scene, they used a “collective hand” experiment: eight people coloring one sequence, passing the frames on like playing cards. So person 1 had frames 1, 9, 17, and so on, such that each hand left its own shade and texture. Across the ninety-six frames of the sequence, the eye blends those differences until eight collaborative minds merge into one. Seventy hours of work dissolve into fifteen seconds of film, time stretching and deepening, as if breath had become form: fragile, tender, alive. Here’s a look at the choreography behind it all:

The Languages of Loss

There were five short films that night, each carrying its own texture of grief and love:
A Cuban volleyball player haunted by the echo of a friend’s memory, his victories shadowed by absence.
Mourners at a widow’s retreat learning, in each other’s stories, how to keep breathing.
A Cambodian grandmother roused from her peaceful afterlife by news that her queer grandson was being pressured into marrying a woman—returning to help him choose love on his own terms.
A bereft child reshaped by the pull of the sea, grief settling into the rhythm of tides.

Different cultures, different languages, but all circling the same question: How do we live, knowing it all must end?

When Death Stands Beside You

I was so absorbed in the ache and tenderness of the films—the way grief and love moved together—that I missed my cue to go on stage. When I finally stepped forward, the night already felt full, and my words could only settle into what was already there.

Death and I have met in many places: war zones, mass graves, prison cells where loss clings to the air.

Now death lives inside my body. It has stripped away performance, leaving what matters in sharp relief and letting the rest fall away.

And in that stripping away, life grows richer. With death at my shoulder, I carry a fiercer joy and a deeper attention to what’s here now.

When we meet death with presence, time changes shape. Every choice sharpens: how to spend a day, what to say to those we love, where to place our attention.

But that clarity fades if we keep death in the shadows.

So we speak of it. We strip away the mystery. We show up for our dying—not just at the end, but long before. And we stop pretending that silence will spare us.

That’s why these films mattered. They refused to look away, holding an unflinching gaze that stilled us long enough to meet the face of loss.

When the panel ended, the air held the stillness that comes when strangers realize they’ve been inside the same story. People lingered. Some waited until the crowd thinned, then stepped forward, voices low, to share astonishing stories—lives brushed by death, losses carried, love that endured beyond the body. We don’t choose the moment of our death, but we do choose how we live until it comes. Nights like this press that truth into my palm, curl my fingers around it, and whisper: Here. This is yours. Spend it while you can.

As I left, the moon kept watch, the toy dinosaurs stood guard, and I walked away holding time in both hands.

P.S. For anyone who wants the medical side of things (scans, treatment options, what’s next) here’s a short video with the deets.