Original subtitles

This programme contains strong language

One time, when I was 13 years old

and I was spending a week at my grandparents' house,

and I was locked in the bathroom one night, late,

after they had gone to sleep,

and I was furiously masturbating, the way 13-year-old boys do,

and I suddenly had this urge to rub the head of my penis

on the underside of the Formica counter,

because the top was smooth

and I assumed the bottom would be smooth as well.

Although I found out immediately that it was unfinished wood

and I got a whole bunch of splinters in the head of my penis.

Now, I couldn't wake my grandparents up and tell them that.

Obviously, I would have rather died than do that.

So I crept around their house until I found a pair of tweezers.

And then I locked myself back in the bathroom,

and I carefully removed all of the splinters

from my penis, wrapped it in toilet paper,

which obviously got blood on it, and went to sleep.

Until now, that was probably the greatest mistake that I made,

but not getting a colonoscopy when I turned 50 -

that one... is a little bit bigger!

Ah, it's all garbage.

When I told my mother that I had colon cancer,

the first thing she said was, "What a fucking idiot!"

She said, "That is the easiest cancer to stop.

"All you need to do is get a colonoscopy."

And I MAY still defeat it, but if I don't, she's right -

I'm a fucking idiot.

I'm going through this because I want to kind of make sure

there's nothing sentimental or important

that somebody else may want after I'm gone.

Toilet paper. Maxell tapes.

Andre is the most brilliant idiot that you've ever met.

He's got a mind unlike most people I know. In fact, virtually everyone.

I have a feeling somewhere in here,

I have a pair of Kim Kardashian's pants.

Oh, this is fun. This is awesome!

I started buying hash and storing it in here, and the idea was,

in case of a massive earthquake, I would use this as currency.

And I also included a little pipe with it.

Andre just always has had a penchant for obscure facts and a curiosity.

Yeah, this might be her pants. Kim Kardashian.

"Congratulations, I'm thrilled that you won

"one of the items from my Kim's Kloset auction."

And then it goes to the Life Change Community church. "Thank you."

And it's signed by Kim Kardashian.

Now, my plan was to scrape her DNA off of them,

because you can't really wash pleather pants.

And we could... clone her from them, someday.

You never know what's going to come out of him.

It could be quoting Nietzsche,

it could be hot chicks picking up dog shit.

It was either here or way the fuck out there.

But the biggest Andre paradox was Janice.

One day, we had been drinking in the bar for a few hours,

and Janice, the bartender, approached Johnny and said,

"Look, I'm Canadian. I need a green card. Will you marry me?"

Because I was in my last year of college,

my student visa was going to expire and I was going to get deported.

So I thought, "Well, I need to ask Jonny D to marry me,"

because he didn't like the ladies so much,

so I thought that would be uncomplicated.

And he's like, "No, I'm not going to marry you."

And I said, "I'll marry you!"

And I was like, "What?!"

She's like, "Are you sure you want to do this?

"Like, you know, there's no sex, it's purely platonic.

"But if you wanted to marry me,

"you could move into the apartment over the bar with me."

I was like, "Great, sounds wonderful."

I figured it meant free drinks in the bar

because I married the bartender.

Which, you know, to Andre, is me being, like, the Wizard of Oz.

She promised me a trip to Mexico.

That was the payment for the green card marriage.

And I had to stay married to her for two years.

I went to Haight Street

and bought an old wedding dress from the Goodwill for $30,

and twined it up with a string to make it fit.

Andre was wearing a powder blue tux.

I think his brother happened to be in town, flew in from Japan.

We happened to be stopping over on the way back

from New York to San Francisco.

And I was like, "Great, I'm getting married that night.

"It's perfect. You can come to my wedding."

"Is he serious?!" Because Andre being Andre,

you never know what is serious and what is not.

I was sort of interested in somebody who I was working with,

and Andre had a girlfriend who was at our wedding.

My girlfriend didn't take it very well.

As a matter of fact, she got drunk and spent the night

in Golden Gate Park alone.

So maybe some people had a sense that this might be something

more than just a green card wedding, but I didn't.

Who is this woman that he's marrying that I didn't know anything about?

"If he's marrying some woman out of a joke or a lark,

"then what do I say to our parents?"

I'm a super rule follower, so I immediately was afraid

that I was going to get deported or we'd get caught or whatever it was.

So I insisted that we had to just really, in an intense way,

get to know each other really fast and really well.

We would stay up, like, until four in the morning,

just talking about our pasts and our childhoods,

quizzing each other and...

Which side of the bed would you have slept on,

and what colour would your toothbrush be, and...

What kind of milk do you prefer? Skim or whole?

What did you do in the summers when you were a kid?

Who was your fourth-grade teacher?

When did you learn to tie your shoes? You know, bunny ears or not?

Just unnecessarily detailed.

We anticipated that our INS interview

was going to be very much like The Newlywed Game,

so we went and tried out for it.

Hi, I'm Gary Kroeger and I've been searching

beautiful San Francisco for their very best newlywed couples.

You know what? I found them!

Please welcome Janice and Andre Ricciardi.

Hey. Welcome, welcome. Good luck to you.

If I could be any celebrity, I would love to be...

Ozzy Osbourne!

- Michael Jackson's chimp Bubbles. - I knew that! - I love that monkey!

I knew that!

And you can't exactly cheat.

We had discussed beforehand,

"How do we maximise our ability to maybe win this thing?"

We figured out a method for cheating, which was,

if there's an obvious true answer, pick that first.

"She's secretly in love with Stephen King."

- That's my wife! - Yeah! - That is my wife.

I don't know if I can hug you for that one!

If there isn't an obvious true answer, pick the nicer one.

For 50 points, born perfect or needs a little work?

- Born perfect. - OK. - All right! Woo!

And if there isn't a nicer one,

then pick the one that starts with the higher letter in the alphabet.

Pepperoni or mushroom. Andre?

- Pepperoni. - Perfect. - Yeah! - You get it.

And then we started to gain and gain...

- Counts his pennies or loses track of money? Mark. - Counts my pennies.

- You do. Andre. - Loses track of the money! - You're on a roll.

- Prefers an outside table. - You're on a roll.

- Spontaneous! - Boy, you are doing well.

All right, for 100 points and a trip to the Caribbean -

he knows what she wants in bed, or he needs to be told.

All right, Andre, don't say anything. You've got 230 right now.

In first place right now are the Christiansens.

If you get this right, you're going to the Caribbean.

Otherwise, say bon voyage to the Christiansens.

- I know! - OK!

And using that simple strategy,

we got ourselves a trip to the Sonesta Beach Resort

on the island of Anguilla - that WE had to fucking pay taxes on!

Andre called me a couple of weeks later and he said,

"I have a problem. I've fucked my wife." And I said, "I'm sorry?"

And he said, "Well, I mean, we actually had sex.

"Now, it's supposed to just be a green card marriage,

"but now I've fucked her, so now we're married on paper

"and we're actually... we had sex together.

"But it's not clear where our relationship is,

"and I'm really not sure what this kind of means."

It was one of those things where

we were just so impressed with ourselves.

Like, we were just like, "We are a good team."

And then Janice had to have her INS interview,

and the interviewer was completely just a dick and humourless.

And he's like, "What proof of a shared life do you have?"

And we're like, "We bought a car together,

"we have insurance together, we live together."

And then we mentioned, "Well, we were on The Newlywed Game."

He was like, "Oh, well."

And he closes all his books up and he's like,

"If you won The Newlywed Game, there's nothing I can ask you

"that they didn't already ask you. Have a nice life."

And then we knew we'd done it and we'd passed

and everything was going to be fine,

except that now I'm admitting all this fraud.

We were in love at that point. We started sleeping together.

I broke up with my girlfriend. She broke up with her boyfriend.

It was like, "Well, how much harder could having a kid be

"than winning The Newlywed Game?"

I've always called my dad "Andre".

I have always called him by his first name.

I pretty much always call my dad "Andre",

and I have since I was a little kid.

I think my dad is very unique,

and so my relationship with him is very unique.

Some of my friends' parents, they're just surprised

when they meet him because he'll, like,

make crazy jokes or he swears a lot.

Well, my dad looks like someone who lives on the street.

He had, like, huge hair. That was, like, kind of his signature thing.

It's just Andre.

Close for us looks different

than it might for other fathers and daughters.

We're not, like, hugging or touching.

We're not really into that as a family.

He wants a more cerebral relationship with them.

You know, "Let's talk about the Ottoman Empire,

"let's talk about all these conspiracy theories,

"and let's talk about great books."

At one point I was recovering from a surgery,

and so I was kind of immobile.

And my dad read me all of Helter Skelter,

the book about the Manson murders.

The nurses would come in and out of the room

and hear him reading this to his daughter,

who was lying in the hospital bed.

And it was definitely, like,

a perfect encapsulation of our relationship.

And I think that was a really poignant moment for me.

If I had to describe Andre in one word, it would be "insane".

Andre had creative gifts that he could have done

a million things with.

He just happened to get into advertising with those gifts.

- "Say, shoot, darn and fudge instead of - BLEEP, BLEEP - and - BLEEP."

He's pitching ideas that would get the company sued.

- All right, bruv, how you doin'? - We're on our way.

We're going to have some fun.

Amber Duick is suing Toyota for cyberstalking her in an ad stunt.

He was so talented that you put up with his shit.

I remember one time we're working on a massive project

for 20th century Fox, an ad campaign for Planet of the Apes.

I think we called it The Apes Are Getting Smarter.

The apes are getting smarter, and of course...

And the human evolution and, like... Jesus fucking Christ.

Andre's ranting, but the head of Fox Film Entertainment

was like, "No shit."

You only have time in life to get really good at a couple of things,

so you need to be really careful what you get good at,

and I chose to get good at... advertising?!

What the fuck is wrong with me? What a waste of a life.

I can't tell you how inconsequential advertising seems

once you are diagnosed with cancer.

Hi, everybody. Here we are in my kitchen.

It's about 18 hours-plus before I get my first colonoscopy, and...

I'll never forget that - Katie Couric getting a colonoscopy,

live on Good Morning America, or whatever show she was on,

because her husband had just passed away of colon cancer.

I thought that's what this experience

was going to be like for me. I was joking around with the nurses

and the doctors, as I always do when I'm nervous.

I made my usual joke, which was, "I'm a drug addict.

"You gotta give me twice the usual dose."

- I give... - I'd like to request plenty of... - No, I give...

- I give you what you need. - ...of sedation.

I give... No, I give you what you need.

She had been drugged, so she was kind of twilight.

The anaesthesiologist knocks you out.

You're fully under for about 15 minutes,

and they put a camera in your ass and they look at

your polyps, or no polyps.

So this is the process that I went through.

It's as clean as a whistle.

This is a perfectly normal examination.

- That wasn't bad at all. - No, no.

But my colonoscopy was not a happy, joyous, fun occasion

with laughter, like when Katie Couric

did it live on television.

As I started waking up, there was all this buzzing around me,

there was all this activity, and I heard one guy saying to another guy,

"That was over 45 minutes.

"That's the longest colonoscopy I've ever been to."

And I thought, that could be good, that could be bad.

And I'm dopey and I'm just waking up,

and I'm starting to realise something's wrong.

And then the doctor came over and said, "Hi, Andre.

"Erm, I hate to say this, but we weren't able to

"perform a colonoscopy because..."

"..there's a mass in there so big that we can't even get

"a paediatric camera in there."

And so I said, "Well, what does that mean?"

And she said, "Well, it looks cancerous.

"I don't know. I put a tattoo on it" -

didn't tell me what the tattoo was, but I guess that's

something they do - "and I took a biopsy of it

"and we'll find out, and we'll call you in a couple of days."

They hadn't done a biopsy, they hadn't done anything.

And I was like, "How dare they just blurt out that you have cancer?!"

They haven't confirmed anything. It's not going to be true.

Maybe two, three days later, the phone rang.

I saw it was Doctor... I don't know what her name actually was

because I just had her in my phone as "Ass Doctor".

So, staging-wise, what does that mean?

Erm, what would that be?

Ah, fuck...!

Oh, fuck.

- - Well, if you chose to move forward with treatment, you...

I went into the room afterwards, expecting him to say,

"Oh, there's a polyp," or, "Oh, there's...

"..something, there's something small,

"there's the beginnings of something.

"It's maybe stage one."

And he said it was stage four,

and he just was ashen.

I think just shocked, erm,

and I think stayed shocked

for a long time.

It's fascinating that I am dying and I want to document it.

I want to learn from it.

One way to deal with it, one way to obsess about my cancer

and my impending mortality without focusing on the anxiety of it,

is to make this film.

103, take seven marker.

CREW CHATTERS

I think Andre is making this movie ultimately because Andre wants

to do everything his way, including dying, and this is Andre.

Andre interview, take one.

If somebody else came to me and said,

"I have colon cancer and I want

"to make a documentary about my own death,"

I don't know how I would feel about that.

I would be sort of torn.

I would want to respect their wishes,

but I would also think this is going to get really personal and ugly,

and I'm not sure I would want to show that for somebody else.

But for me? I'm all in. I don't give a fuck, you know?

If you guys want pictures of my colon,

I will gladly give you pictures of my colon.

And I think for Andre, he gets a kick out of it.

I was going to stick my tongue in that, but I decided not to.

It's also saying "fuck you" to convention.

What better way to spend his final days on our planet?

Yesterday I was at the hospital for six hours of chemotherapy,

something you can avoid, er, pretty easily if you get a colonoscopy.

As you can see, I am shirtless.

Not just to show off my wonderfully tan, er, buff physique,

but also to show you that I'm still plugged in here,

and I'm still receiving chemotherapy,

and I will be for the next 24 hours.

And then I have this ball of chemotherapy,

and this is slowly emptying over 24 hours.

When they're changing the bags of the IVs,

they wear full protective gear, including mask and gloves. Erm...

It's sort of ironic that this is

something you can't get on your skin,

but they're putting it into a port that delivers it directly

into an artery next to my heart so that it can pump through my body.

Er, and that's something you just get used to, I guess.

Dying is surprisingly boring.

This is like a vacation for me.

That's a weird thing to say, but there's sort of this feeling of,

"Oh, my God, I have a terminal illness.

"I have an illness that, you know, in all probabilities

"is going to kill me within five years."

And I feel part of me feels like the entire world should

come screeching to a halt and I should feel different

and everything's now going to change into this "I'm dying" mode.

And it didn't. And it isn't.

I'm still unloading the dishwasher every morning.

I'm still sitting in the same place,

looking at the same fucking websites.

And there's something really fascinating about that to me,

which is how mundane my own death is and how routine it feels already.

And it's only been eight, ten weeks that I've been diagnosed with this.

Andre's surprisingly positive about all this,

which is not anything any of us would have ever called.

My wife was saying last night that it's sad.

I don't think it's necessarily sad.

I mean, I think this, to me, doesn't look like a disgusting ball

of chemotherapy hair.

To me, this just looks like a cute little character, you know?

With a couple of googly eyes...

You know, I'm creating all these little creatures

that now live in my house.

CREATURES COO AND LAUGH

The most serious thing in the world is dying from cancer.

I mean, it's hard to think of a more serious, draconian topic.

And yet, Andre's laughing and joking and teasing and having fun.

So now he's got the most painful situation,

and he's using a proportionate amount of humour.

You know, it's not the end of the world.

Am I in denial about it? I don't even think so.

Like, go on, go on. You're free.

HE BLOWS

Whee!

There's really no cancer in my family,

so I've thought about this long and hard,

and I have some theories of where it could have come from.

How I got cancer - theory number one.

I ingested rat poison in Tompkins Square Park in the early '90s.

I smoked cigarettes for 22 years.

Salami.

My mother gave it to me.

When she was eight, she and her friends used to run behind

the trucks that sprayed DDT.

My mother was born with all the eggs she would ever have in her life.

One of those eggs that I was fertilised

and born from would have been present

in my mother when she was an eight-year-old girl.

Anyway, thanks, Mom.

- Hey, can I get two slices of cheese? - Of cheese? - Yep.

- I'll have a pepperoni. - I got it.

- You sure? You got it yesterday. - I got it.

I will always buy you pizza, Lee.

- Even in death, I will buy you pizza. - Aww, thanks, man.

- How are you going to do that? - I don't know.

We gotta figure that out. We don't have much time.

Andre and I are not a couple in the traditional term of

what someone might think is a couple.

I consider Andre to be soul-mate status.

There is that older brother, younger brother dynamic.

Lee is the quintessential older brother,

and I'm the quintessential younger brother.

I invited Andre a couple of years ago,

when I was scheduling a colonoscopy, to come get a colonoscopy with me.

A couple's colonoscopy.

And my first thought was, "OK, he wants me to hold his hand

"because he's scared and he wants me to go with him

"and make it easier for him."

And so I said, "I'm happy to drive you,"

you know, "whatever you need. Tell me when it is."

And he said, "No, no, no, no, I don't want you to drive me

"to the colonoscopy, I want you to come with me

"and get a colonoscopy with me.

"We'll go in together. It'll be like a spa day.

"We'll just do it as a couple's thing."

We both would drink some liquids and shit ourselves together.

SOUNDS OF DEFECATION

I thought for sure, if there was anyone

that was going to get a couple's colonoscopy with me,

it was going to be Andre.

Look, I'm not going to go get a colonoscopy with my friend.

It's just a weird fucking thing.

I probably came home and said to my wife, "Hey, by the way,

"Lee said we should go get a colonoscopy together."

And my wife probably said something to me like, "Are you fucking crazy?

"Why would you do that with somebody else? That's insane."

I instantly, of course, thought, "Oh, he's going to go do that

"with somebody else.

"Does he already have a couple's colonoscopy in place?"

Cos why wouldn't he want to go do this?

We need to do this. This needs to happen.

We're at the age where it needs to happen.

And almost to the day, a year after that,

I was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer

that had metastasised to my liver.

His rejection of that couple's colonoscopy is

what led directly to Andre having cancer.

Had I gone a year before, I probably would have had cancer anyway,

but it probably would have been really easy to treat.

I'm not angry that he didn't get a colonoscopy.

I mean, his motto used to be, "No cops, no doctors".

I think, obviously, this could have been avoided

or it could have been less severe.

I was just as ignorant of it as he was.

And it's not like it was ten years late.

It was, you know, 18 months late or something like that.

If he'd had a history of it in his family, if he'd had symptoms...

But, no, I hadn't had one. We're the same age.

He's very stoic and very much doesn't put his own health first

in a lot of ways.

I mean, the long answer is, if someone was going to die young,

it was probably going to be Andre.

SQUAWKING

He's also the kind of person that would say, like,

"Oh, I'm supposed to die early. That's what I was supposed to do.

"I've lived a crazy life," whatever.

Andre had a complex relationship to drugs and alcohol over the years.

There were years where I drank every night until I passed out.

I've probably done cocaine five, six times in my life.

Done acid 100 times, 150 times in my life.

I tried to do mushrooms a couple of times a year,

just to clear out the cobwebs.

He never did cocaine. He never did harder drugs.

I've dabbled in heroin. I used to snort it.

I have used meth quite a bit. Ecstasy, sure. Whatever, erm...

But nothing... Nothing more serious than that.

Nothing more serious than, you know, meth and heroin, I guess!

Andre never really took great care of himself.

He used to smoke a ton. I think he used to dip.

He drank A LOT.

And I think finally he had a run-in with his doctor,

and the doctor's like, "You gotta... you gotta start

"taking care of yourself."

I had quit drinking three years before I got cancer.

I was waking up every morning at five in the morning,

getting myself as high as I could possibly get myself.

And then getting on the peloton and riding for 45 minutes.

I lost 30lbs, I was getting into shape,

I felt like I was in the best shape of my life,

and about once a week I would bleed out of my ass.

But I thought it was a haemorrhoid.

I just assumed this is another haemorrhoid.

I had a Zoom appointment with some doctor I've never met before.

They couldn't look at his ass on Zoom.

He did not ask me to turn around and open my ass up to him,

although I was prepared to.

So he just described his symptoms and the doctor said,

"Oh, yeah, that sounds like a haemorrhoid

"from the riding the peloton too hard."

"There you go. Get some Preparation H. You're done."

Turns out I wasn't in the best shape of my life. I had cancer.

TOILET FLUSHES

When he first got his diagnosis, we hunkered down.

I immediately was reading every single list

of every nutritional thing we might need,

and stocking the house with all these protein drinks

and getting cookbooks on cancer diets

and all this sort of thing.

My mom's a really great caretaker.

My dad would definitely not be

as brave and resilient as he was if she wasn't there,

like, helping him every step of the way.

He handles chemo really well.

He's kind of impervious to a lot of the worst side-effects.

I absolutely prepared myself for chemotherapy by making sure

I had hangovers for a good 35 years of my life.

The mental aspect of it is similar.

I feel like shit. I feel like I'm going to die.

I need to put all that out of my mind,

shut up about it and just keep doing whatever I'm doing.

I think for people who don't have long periods

of alcoholism in their lives and hangovers,

this would be a much more challenging thing.

He still looks good, I think, for someone

who's been doing so much chemo, and he doesn't have that, like,

skinny look that I kind of expected.

Things are going well with the cancer.

The cancer is shrinking.

The cancer is still responding to the chemotherapy.

I've gained a bunch of weight back, which is good.

I've actually reached the point now where perhaps I'm getting

a little too much weight and I should go on a diet.

I'm having a harder time with Andre's hair loss than he is.

Basically, the back of his hair fell off.

So when you look at him straight on, it looks like he still

has his hair pulled back in a man bun.

But the whole man bun is gone, and I don't think he cares.

Andre has changed since his diagnosis,

and I thought that he would go angry.

But Cancer Andre's really nice.

Some of it may have to do with all the weed he's eating.

We've started spending way more time together.

I used to go on solo exercise walks around the lake,

and now every single day, together, we go to the beach or the lake

and we walk a couple of miles.

And, you know, we talk about... sometimes, things other than cancer.

Where's the most beautiful duck of all?

Toasted marshmallow?

DUCKS QUACK - Fuck you! - Stop. - What?

Part of it, I think, is him having hope

and having a new appreciation for his life

and our lives and his friends.

But part of it is also being a stoic maturity.

As vulnerable as he looks, talking about going to chemo,

he's still guarding the very most vulnerable part of himself.

There's a lot of nitty gritty we don't talk about.

He's not willing to talk about pain and fear.

It's definitely hard for my mom.

Probably harder on her

than anybody else in the family.

But I don't know, we don't really talk about, like,

how we're feeling about it that much.

My parents keep a lot of the details from my sister and me,

but I don't really want to know a lot of details.

We don't really talk about how we feel about it,

but we're both very happy

with how strong and resilient he's being.

It's hard to decide how much to tell the girls,

because we want to be honest with them,

but we don't want to burden them.

I'm realising that I'm really good in the immediate panic

of a situation like this,

but figuring out how to act, longer-term, is harder.

I can't just swoop in and fix everything,

and...

So that's when I have a harder time figuring out my role.

I'm staying up till two in the morning reading, you know,

Diane's Success Story: "I'm a colon cancer survivor."

I like to think that he'll beat this.

Maybe both of us are in a little bit of denial.

And I think we like to label it as hopefulness.

Once Andre told me his diagnosis,

there was a moment,

maybe a day or two,

where I was, like, almost afraid to call.

But, like, there was things that happened that...

Like, I saw something funny,

that it would be a thing that we would need to talk about.

And I was standoffish for a couple of days.

It was really eating at me.

Why was I treating him different just because he had cancer?

There is an awkwardness and an unease

that's always existed between people and death.

Because we're aware of our mortality

and we don't know what happens after we die,

it's taboo to talk about.

One thing about our friendship

and a coping mechanism that Andre and I have always had

is that we find humour in shitty situations.

From the beginning, we sort of decided,

"Let's not change at all how we speak to each other."

And once we did that,

we didn't have to change anything about our friendship.

Hey, do you want to make a wish?

- Mm-hm. - What would you wish for?

LAUGHTER

I don't know.

I don't know. What...?

LAUGHTER

- Er, I can't think of anything. - I can't think of anything.

Let's keep the same irreverence that I have applied

to absolutely everything in my life.

It's not like, all of a sudden, "Guys, I'm dying, it's so sad.

"You've got to take this seriously." Fuck that.

How's Andre's cancer?

- It's goofy. -Oh, it's pretty good.

LAUGHTER

I don't know.

He's not wallowing in it.

We're actually having fun with Andre dying.

And I know that sounds crazy to say,

but this is so very Andre - to do it that way.

Come on, kids, you want to take your picture

with anal cancer?

LAUGHTER

And then, when the anal cancer takes its mask off,

it's just a real person and it freaks the kids out.

My dad has always, my whole life,

kind of joked about wanting to be preserved -

like, cryogenic freezing and freezing of the head

and freezing of the body -

to one day cure whatever killed him and then be brought back to life.

The next decision I would have to make

is whether I want to get my body cryogenically frozen.

My whole body or just my head?

Is that it? Or is that...?

No, we only offer full body.

OK, well, that simplifies it.

I printed out my genome.

I printed these up for two reasons.

One, I wanted to copyright them so that I own my own genome.

But the other thing is,

I thought it would be fun to have a hard copy printed out

so that, perhaps at some point in the future,

somebody could clone me or, you know,

create a new me.

He comes up with a bunch of ideas every day,

and most of them are just crazy Andre ideas.

And then some of them come to be actual things

that other people have done.

Andre is more Aristotelian than Platonic.

He wants to know it all.

He also has this incredible knack

to be able to navigate the web like nobody I've ever met in my life.

And in an era now of the internet,

he can conjure up the most obscure knowledge

about almost anything.

There's a website for the death yells.

I believe it's deathyells.com.

I didn't know how serious it was at first, but it just...

It was an idea I had never heard of,

and it was that, you know, you should really

work on your last words.

But this was a completely new twist on it.

And whether this guy is a nut or not

didn't make any difference.

It was like, "This seems like something I should be doing

"now that I'm terminally ill."

So I called Lee

and I was trying to think of funny ones

on the car ride up.

I mean, I've been talking about my last words.

- Yeah. - I just don't have any ideas.

Well, my father-in-law -

because we were there when he passed,

and everyone was around, and he just said,

"I'm really tired."

And literally, that's the last thing I heard him say.

That's kind of complaining.

- I guess this is our...? - Hey.

Ryan. Nice to see you.

Welcome to my office.

This will be the most important sound

you will ever make on this earth.

The death yell.

- And it's the last sound this earth will hear from you. - Mm.

And so it should be simple and concise.

And it should really be, you know, from the heart.

But also connect with your audience, whoever that audience may be.

I've heard the story that you don't really die

until nobody speaks your name anymore.

The real death that happens is when you're forgotten.

So I figure, with a good death yell, you could extend your life...

- Yeah. - ...infinitely, potentially.

All you want is to inspire the people around you

and have the people on the other side...

- Right. - ...be excited to meet you.

Inspire the people around me to do what?

Just to feel, you know?

To feel, "Wow, that was a powerful force."

Not like, "Oh, geez, that was awkward."

- The death yell. - Yeah.

- All right. - This is the place.

And if you hear the echo, feel it back,

you kind of will know if it's right or not.

Fuck, yeah, man!

- No. - No? Horrible.

RYAN SIGHS Just take a deep breath,

close your eyes, and the first thing that comes to mind.

So long, suckers!

- Yeah. - Like that? - Yeah.

- All right. - Yes.

- That feels pretty good. - Yeah. - All right.

Come and get me, spaceman!

Getting weird.

If you get on a roller-coaster

or you're on the freeway, like, practise.

Just, like, somebody at their last moment -

and they, you know, got hit by a car -

like, they could go, "Ooh!

"Ooh! Bleurgh!"

It could be in the street, it could be in an ice cream shop -

you'll never know.

And that's why you've got to practise.

Like, you want to go out with something

that's strong and powerful.

Bo! Ka-ka-ka-ka!

Clack-a-lack-a-lack! Fire in the hole!

I'm coming to get you, God!

THEY SCREAM

Yeah. Yeah.

- That was pretty good! - I've got to sit down!

You might actually die doing this.

LAUGHTER

I feel like I taste blood in my throat.

- OK. - Good? - Yeah.

You mentioned a couple weeks ago to me an idea that you had.

Yes. OK.

Imagine this as a big, network,

competitive unscripted television show.

So think of, like, The Voice, right?

But this isn't The Voice.

What this show is, it's called Who Wants to Kill Me?

And the idea of the show is we bring in five or six people

who have legitimate reasons for wanting to kill me.

Maybe there's just an ex-girlfriend who hates me.

A chef who really wants to cook with human flesh.

Use me as a medical experiment.

Blow me up.

Put me in a stadium, release the lions

and see how long I can fight them.

And then America votes,

and whoever they vote for gets to take my life.

Because it would be much better to let anybody kill me.

An amateur magician

or a budding serial killer

or an ex-girlfriend

seem much more appealing to me than letting cancer kill me.

But maybe that's not true.

Well, I think, you know, you...

- ...have a capacity to find the comedic in everything. - Right.

And so I would say, you know, the goal is to make

enough room so that multiple feelings

can be fully present at the same time,

that the tragic and the beautiful and the comic -

that there's space for all of it.

There may be moments for you to visit grief more fully.

You know, it is beautiful, it is funny,

it is outrageous,

and it's also very sad that you have cancer, Andre.

I've been collecting other people's

old photo albums since I was a child.

I used to buy them at junk shops, at antique stores,

at garage sales.

There's something profoundly private about a photo album.

It's like this unfiltered look at who they are

in a way that you just can't get anywhere else.

This is really subtle and hard to see

in an otherwise completely boring album.

It's maybe 25 pictures of Christmas,

and there's nothing really interesting about it.

But then there's this one mistake in the album

that I'm sure they did not mean to reveal.

And when I saw it, it terrified me.

It's a picture of a family standing around

in front of the Christmas tree.

And then, a few pictures later,

there's a second picture taken just a second before that first one.

Only, in this second photograph, you can see the head of somebody

who appears to be right behind the woman, holding her up.

And when I first saw it,

it looked like there was just this ghost behind the woman.

Why is there this woman behind this other woman?

And as I looked at it, it seems like she's wearing

a white uniform and she has white hair.

And I realised she's probably the housekeeper,

the maid, the helper.

And she's probably holding this woman up

because the woman has polio and can't stand -

and that was something that they were ashamed of.

They're trying to hide it.

They're doing everything they can to hide it.

People really tend to be very private

about their weaknesses,

about their vulnerabilities.

So we paint the portraits that we want people to see.

We create the vision of ourselves that we want people to see.

But the most beautiful,

most fascinating portraits

are the ones that aren't the idealised version.

They're the ones that show the flaws that are in us

and tell that more complete story.

The thing about colon cancer is it responds well to medicine.

Often people will go into remission -

maybe not with stage four,

but stage one or stage two or stage three cancer.

You'll feel like you beat it, time will go by,

and then it comes roaring back.

And when it comes back,

it's much more aggressive, it spreads much quicker

and it doesn't respond to medication,

and you tend to die very quickly.

I responded really well to the chemo from December, January

a year ago -

all the way through the summer.

But they had to keep reducing the doses

of the chemo they were giving me cos my platelets were so low.

I went almost eight weeks without getting any chemotherapy.

My hair started growing back.

Only it's really not my hair -

it feels like somebody else's hair.

It's much thinner than my hair is, it's much darker.

It's also sort of wispy and thin and somewhat straight.

It's kind of strange that it's grown back this way.

I imagine there's probably some guy

walking around in the Midwest losing his hair,

wondering who's finding it.

Well, it's me. I'm finding your hair.

And thank you.

As the hair has grown back, so has the cancer.

So, the healthier I look,

that means the sicker I probably am right now.

You know, people see me and they're like,

"Hey, you look great."

And I'm like, "Yeah, but I can feel the cancer coming back

"in my liver again.

"If you put your hand right here, you can feel a little tumour."

And, you know, that sort of thing.

And people don't like doing that at lunch, I've noticed.

OK, so we are going to the hospital

so I can get my usual three-month scan.

Janice, you got anything to add?

I'm going for just straight-up positivity -

and that this is all going to be just excellent news.

She's going to give you a prize.

All excellent news and a prize.

That's what Janice is predicting.

I went in for the scans.

Then, two days after it,

while I was in the shower,

my phone started blowing up.

One of the texts was from my oncologist,

and the first line of her email said,

"So those scans were disappointing."

And I thought, "Oh, fuck."

So the things in the lungs are really tiny.

The largest of these pulmonary nodules

measures seven millimetres,

but I would say that the vast majority are more

in the two, three millimetre range.

The liver is the part that is the most concerning right now.

Mm-hm.

I think the oncologist gave us the idea

that the spread to the lungs and the adrenal glands

weren't as concerning

as what they called the "innumerable tumours" in his liver.

And, you know, when a scientist just uses the word "innumerable",

it seems frightening.

♪ Cancer's getting meaner

♪ And it ain't never been fun

♪ Supposed to get you when you're old

♪ And now it gets you when you're young

♪ Cancer's always been depressing

♪ Cancer's never been pleasant

♪ It don't care if you're a royal

♪ Don't care if you're a peasant. ♪

You know, every scan I've gotten has been OK.

Things have just been sort of smoothly going along.

And suddenly this catastrophe happens.

And my first instinct was,

"Why don't we get out and do something?"

And it just made sense to drive.

We could get out of San Francisco for the first time in years.

We could see a bit of the country that I've never been to.

I think most people would go to Paris and Nice

and, you know, go eat pizza in Naples.

And instead we saw a whole lot of just nothing.

And I love nothing.

And I really wanted to spend some time with Lee.

Girl from my high school died.

Mattress blew off the car in front of her.

- Really? - Yeah.

She died pretty, you know?

- The idea that you, you know... - Yeah.

You want to... You want to leave a pretty corpse.

- Yeah. - I subscribe to that.

I mean, I think my corpse is still fuckable.

- Yeah. - But not, you know...

- Sure. - And I think as I lose a little more weight,

- as time goes on with the chemo... - Yeah.

...I'll look better and better.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to that.

We drove for hours

and we got out to this dead lakebed,

this desert out in the middle of nowhere,

and we could do whatever the fuck we wanted.

LAUGHTER Holy shit, dude!

Well...

Now what?

LAUGHTER

Let's do some drugs.

This is probably the farthest I've been from a city

in my entire life.

Yeah, there's just nothing.

The first thing I noticed was the silence.

I-I don't even know how to sort of describe it.

I've never really experienced silence like that before.

For the first time in maybe my life,

I was just alone with my thoughts...

...and all that nothingness.

And of course, that made me think of death.

That's what I think death is. I expect death to be empty.

And that was about as empty as I've ever felt.

The other guys! LAUGHTER

Crying at the beauty, my friend.

Crying at the beauty.

We just had a good time.

I ate some mushrooms.

We sat around the fire.

All of the tension was gone.

He and I were just sitting out in the middle of nowhere,

under the fucking Milky Way, having a good time.

So what I've been referring to this as

is a piece of work -

not necessarily a TV commercial, but something...

Could be a TV commercial.

Yeah, platform.

...that is a colonoscopy encouragement piece.

Yeah.

This is a way for me to see some redemption,

to use the skills and the connections

and the people and the tools that I have

to actually save some lives.

We know that you're a loudmouth,

you're a pain in the ass.

We know that you're an idiot.

What's happening to you didn't necessarily have to happen.

And so we want to create a campaign

that encourages others to get a colonoscopy

when they turn 45.

Idea number one.

LAUGHTER All right!

And what we're trying to do is, we're trying to break through

every barrier in the psyche that men and women have.

So we do have a couple of current clients

that we think we could partner with.

- So... - As a first date?!

- As a first date. - Yeah. - Wow!

OkCupid lets us do outrageous work.

Wow, that would be an amazing first date.

- That would be amazing, right? - So we've got Cheeky Cherry,

we've got Pamplemousse Caboose, we've got Pineapple Dump Truck.

Yeah. Where is the Booty Juice?

We have it right here. Great question.

Great question. I'm glad you...

- I'm glad you... - Nice!

♪ I like to get my colon checked

♪ A colonoscopy. ♪

Assholes are everywhere.

- We had this idea of just doing PSAs... - Yep.

...that are simply colonoscopy reminders.

LAUGHTER

Every one of those is amazing, by the way.

Every one of them is amazing.

The butthole idea, I think, is really good,

and I think it's really funny and I think it fits.

The thing I love about it is the reminder.

Like, suddenly you'll be reminded yourself,

when you see an asshole, to get a colonoscopy.

- Right. - Or something that looks like an asshole. - Yeah.

I'm moving out to go to college.

This is where I grew up and where my family is,

but I don't know if I'll ever live here again.

The fact that he was diagnosed at stage four...

And they are no dummies -

they Googled that beyond what we told them.

But he doesn't want them to see him

sick or weak or scary.

He doesn't want to scare them.

I'm not as honest as I should be with my kids

about how sick I am.

When I'm lying on the couch and I look like I'm dead,

and I'm pale and I haven't got up all day and I don't have a voice,

I say, "What you're seeing is the side-effects

"of the medicine, not the cancer."

But that's not always true.

All right. So I'm not going to hug you, because fuck that.

Have a great time.

- Do you want me to hug you? - No.

- I'm happy to. - That's weird.

- Well, I'm just... - That's not how we do it.

I'm not saying that.

Call me if you need anything at all.

Text me, don't call me - I won't answer.

All right? I wish I was going with you.

- Bye. - See ya.

All right. Off they go.

As you may have noticed,

my eyelashes are particularly long.

And it's a side-effect of one of the medications that I'm on,

but my lashes are sort of horrifying.

They're sort of monstrous.

I keep saying I look like fucking Snuffleupagus.

I do brush them.

My daughter, Delilah, gave me a spoolie

and taught me how to use it.

OK, just open them a little bit more.

- OK, so like this? - Yes.

Tell me your friends aren't all doing this right now

with their dads?

Yeah. No, that's good.

- Much... Yeah. - Yeah.

Oh, yeah. LAUGHTER

Oh, my God, that is, like, to die for.

- Honestly, I love the attention. but it's time to go. - Yeah.

It's just dangerous. I can't drive at night.

- Oh, yeah. - I can't do anything.

- No, I get it. Yeah, you're ready. - So...

And I trust you.

- You can see! - Yeah, I can see!

- You can see! - Oh, my God!

Doctor, what happened to my life?

I was a normal man!

You're still normal. It's just a different stage now.

You're still normal, I swear.

My oncologist noticed that the cancer cells

were no longer susceptible to the chemo

that had been so successful for the last year.

And they said they wanted to do some radiation.

So I met the ass lady at the hospital,

and she was just so chipper and wonderful

and great at her job.

And she said, "In order to do this,

"I'm going to tape your ass cheeks open

"and we're going to put a little sticker over your anus

"so it doesn't get any radiation

"and you don't get any blisters on your anus."

And then the next day I had to come back.

And on the way to the hospital, we passed my voting spot.

And this was election day.

Janice just became an American citizen,

so we went in and we voted together.

We both got those "I just voted" stickers,

and I'm holding the sticker in my hand.

And I had this thought of,

"Wouldn't it be funny if, when I get to the hospital,

"I put the sticker over my own anus" -

as sort of a humble-brag that I voted

and a nod to the fact that this is an awkward situation.

And wouldn't it be a funny surprise?

And then I'm in the room

and I'm getting in the hospital gown,

and I have the sticker out.

And I hesitated at the last minute

because it just felt like I was sexualising the situation

in a way that may make the radiologist uncomfortable.

Five years ago, I wouldn't have hesitated.

I hesitated.

And it would have been devastatingly humiliating,

because the guy who brought me in, who was giving me the MRI,

was not the same funny, calm, normal nurse

that I'd had the day before.

It was this humourless dude

who just didn't smile once the whole time.

And I thought, "Thank God I don't have an 'I just voted' sticker

"on my asshole right now."

I've done 50-something rounds of chemo.

I'm pretty good at chemo.

It makes me tired, it makes me crabby,

it turns me into an asshole for a couple of days,

but I can handle it.

I've learned how to do it.

I cannot do radiation.

The side-effects got worse and worse and worse.

I lost 20lbs.

I was cramping really badly in my stomach.

It kept me from sleeping more than half an hour at a time

for, like, two weeks - which is like torture.

It was fucking hell.

This is the first time

that I've really been in physical, emotional pain.

I never know what to write to you.

"Hey, how's it going?"

Cos I call you, and this is how you answer the phone.

- "Hey, what's up?" - Yeah. No matter what.

- No matter what. - Yeah.

- Yeah. - "Yeah, I'm good.

"I just got stabbed in the neck and I'm bleeding out of my ass,

"but what's up?"

"But it's better than it was 20 minutes ago."

- Make it funny. - Yeah.

- I mean... - Which is fine,

but sometimes I do wish you would just be like, "Dude..."

- And I think I liked the text that was so... - Miserable.

I didn't like it, but I was like... It was real, you know?

I mean, I talk to my shrink about this all the time.

I don't think anybody's like, "Don't laugh at your situation."

- Yeah. - Obviously there's psychological issues

- going on here. - Yeah.

But I'm lucky that I have this vehicle now,

which is myself.

I'm not laughing at other people with colon cancer.

- I'm not laughing at other people who go through this. - Yeah.

But for me, it makes it much easier.

And at some point,

- if I ever get a colostomy bag... - Yeah.

...you know, there's going to be endless jokes.

- Already written. - I'm sure.

- And those are going to be funny jokes... - Yeah.

...and we're going to have a lot of fun with it

- and it's going to be revolting and disgusting. - Yeah.

- And, you know, we're going to do all that stuff. - Uh-huh.

I look forward to that, you know?

Because I really don't look forward to having to shit in a bag

- that's strapped to my body. - Right.

You know what I mean? So what's the upside?

- Well, now at least we get to tell all these jokes. - Yeah.

And I can take it out in a restaurant

and play it like a balloon - letting the air out.

Meeeeee!

I feel like that might get stinky if you do that.

Even better, you know?

But again, going back...

Is the cancer starting to be less funny?

Yeah, literally.

Yes and no. But it shouldn't.

It should be funnier now.

The more the cancer fucks me up, the funnier it should be.

Because it's one thing if you're feeling fine

and you're cracking jokes at the radiologist.

It's another thing if you look like death

and you feel like death

and you're crapping your pants every 20 minutes

and you're still making jokes.

That is victory.

That is how you beat fucking cancer.

So what happens if, in a couple of months or years,

you're in really terminal decline, you can't get out of bed,

you're in excruciating pain,

and you realise it's just not fun anymore and you want to end it?

You know, can I just drink Drano if I want?

Can I do an assisted suicide, drinking Drano,

and then instead of donating my body to science,

I donate it to television?

Am I allowed to do that? I don't know.

I'm sorry. "Donate your body to television"?

Instead of science.

Everybody's OK if you want to donate your body to science.

But if you want to donate your body to television,

people get all squirrelly about that.

How do you donate your body to television?

I don't know. It's what I'm looking into now.

Maybe they need a corpse for something.

So you're saying if you want to die, officially,

along the prescribed legal way...

But you want control over your death.

...you have to donate your body to science,

- or it's expected that you will? - I think it's expected.

Like, I think it's OK to say, "I want to be an organ donor"

or, "I want to donate my body to science".

- You know? Nobody bats an eye at that. - Right.

- That's legal. - So, once again, for Andre,

- you're going to do things your way. - Well...

So, if you're going to donate your body...

Doesn't science have enough bodies?

Look, I'm not suggesting that you get conventionally buried

in a Christian cemetery.

Right? I'm not suggesting that.

I haven't decided yet.

When do you think you'll start making some of these decisions?

I don't know. I gotta work on it.

Standard burial I'm not for at all.

I don't give a shit.

I'm not against cremation,

but if we're going to do cremation, I would rather have a funeral pyre,

like, out in a field somewhere

where you just throw me on the fire and burn me.

They've sent people's ashes into space.

I like that.

I would rather have my whole body sent into space, though.

I know that would be expensive

because I would weigh a lot more.

But if there was a way to just drift around for 50,000 years,

a million years, that would be amazing.

When I talk about life and death issues with you -

not just now, but all your life and my life -

we often flit back and forth from the absurd to the real.

But now it's like the shit is hitting the fence.

- It's real. This is real. - The rubber hit the road.

- This is real. - This is real.

Andre had trepidation asking me about being on camera.

I mean, I'm happy to do it - but I'm private.

Nothing like my father.

My father is one of the most

intensely private people in the world.

The thought of going on camera and discussing his illness,

his weakness, he would never do.

And I respect that, and I understand who he is

and why he wouldn't do that.

This kind of crazy, vulnerable, dark humour...

...everything-out-there project is utterly opposite

who he is as a person.

Being on a movie that he doesn't control is just shocking to him.

It's just unthinkable.

Andre, I think, knows not to directly ask him.

When Andre directly asked him,

"Would you be willing to be in the movie?"

Larry said, "I'd rather do chemo."

So the solution was to clearly get Tommy Chong to play his father.

Because he looks exactly like him,

and he couldn't be more opposite a kind of person.

Is being vulnerable weak?

No, no, it's actually strong.

Strength, yeah.

Vulnerable means being real.

See, had you been my father,

this would be a very different conversation.

Because so much of this I had to find on my own.

I think Andre really appreciates what his father gave him.

But, yeah, it was definitely Opposite Dad Day.

I'll take any kind of problem and turn it into a joke.

- Yeah. - I mean, that's a life philosophy.

The fucking Buddha should've said that.

- He probably did. - He probably did.

He probably got it from somewhere.

But, yeah. That's a whole...

That's a philosophy.

I've done it all my life.

And if I can laugh at it

and I can get other people to laugh at it,

how bad could it fucking be?

I hate to infantilise Andre,

but caregiving is a lot like having

the responsibilities of having a toddler again.

He's not a toddler.

He'd kill me if I was comparing him to a toddler.

But, you know, making a lot of snacks,

trying to get somebody to eat, the occasional tantrum.

You know, it's not tumbling and playdates -

it's hospital and hospital.

Hi, I was hoping you might have a minute to help me schedule

a paracentesis appointment for my husband.

Yeah, sure. Is he a regular already?

Yeah, he's a regular already.

Yes. Poor Andre.

It gives me a lot of satisfaction

to know that I'm helping.

I loved that with my kids.

That's where I shine.

I'm picking up three prescriptions for Andre Ricciardi.

- You said Andre? - Andre, yeah.

- I have, like, six. - Six?

Oh, isn't he lucky? I guess I'll take 'em all, thanks.

- So this one, this one and this one go together? - Yep.

OK. So the one that's a two in quantity

goes with the kit?

- That's correct, yeah. - OK.

Thank you so much. Thanks for spending

- half your day with me. - Yeah. - Bye.

Just last night, he was lying there,

and I was bringing him a peach or something.

And he said, "You know, I'd be dead by now if it weren't for you."

I was sort of, "Oh, pshaw," you know?

Like, "There's no reason you'd be dead.

"You just wouldn't... Your fridge wouldn't be as full

"and you wouldn't get rides everywhere."

And he said,

"No, you just take such good care of me

"and I don't know what I'd do without you.

"And you make me really happy."

And that was a big one.

I've been lying on that couch for weeks,

and Janice has been doing fucking everything

and driving me and doing all that stuff.

And I think Janice's experience is very different than mine

- of what's going on. - Mm.

You know, in a lot of ways

it's much easier to be the patient than the caretaker.

I doubt that!

- Mm, I don't know. I don't know. - I'm just making snacks.

It's more than making snacks.

And I think you take the burden -

so much of the burden and the pain that I'm in -

on yourself.

Mm.

Which, you know,

isn't easy.

- Yeah. - Anyway...

He is much more vulnerable now,

which is not something he would've ever wanted.

But he's sort of willingly vulnerable,

which is super surprising.

I feel like the character in a cheesy '90s movie

who's overworked and stressed

and then has some traumatic brain injury or gets cancer

and becomes a complete human being.

You know, finally fall in love with his wife

or finally realised that everything he needed, he already had.

And it's the kind of movie that I despise.

And yet I'm experiencing that.

OK, we can do this.

Goodish news. Goodish news.

We'll just put a big fake face on,

we'll tell lots of jokes.

And who gives a fuck?

That's the attitude.

It is.

You know, I like to think,

"Well, this is just these current rotten symptoms doing something,

"and we'll solve that.

"And then he'll get back to sort of normal.

"Normal cancer."

Normal cancer was easy in retrospect,

but this shit's scary.

OK. You all right?

Yeah.

I mean, that was... that was pretty bleak, but...

...but...

Clinical trials means...

I know. But, Janice, I'm dying.

Like, the reality of the situation is I'm dying.

And we have to face that, you know?

- No, thank you. - What's that?

No, thank you.

We're OK, Janice. We're going to be OK.

- Yep. - We got time still.

Yep.

Yes, please.

- We still got time. - Yes, please.

Well, good job.

- All righty. I'll see you in a bit. - OK.

ANDRE SIGHS

The other day, he was sitting on the couch

and he just had his head in his hand

and he just said,

"I don't want to do this anymore."

And I started saying, you know,

"Come on." Like, "One more day.

"Let's just keep putting one foot in front of the other.

"You can do this."

And then he looked up at me,

and in his other hand he had his phone.

And he said, "No, I'm talking about the Wordle."

We found this doctor in Italy

who claims that he is absolutely ready

to perform a head transplant from one human to another.

They warned us that his work is very controversial.

My feeling is, "Look, if you're going to put my head

"on another body,

"don't put it on, like, a 30-year-old's body.

"Put it on a ten-year-old's body

"so that I get those extra 20 years to live and to enjoy myself."

And I really wanted to go to Italy and meet this guy

and at least have a consultation with him.

But I'm too sick to go to Italy right now.

And what that made me realise

was time is passing and I'm getting sicker and sicker.

And if there's anything I need to do,

I need to do it immediately.

And that's a scary revelation, you know?

Much rather be getting my head transplanted

on a boy's body.

One of the reasons my recent health problems

have been so disconcerting to Janice

is the physical manifestation of my illness,

which is my belly keeps swelling with this fluid

because my liver's starting to fail.

If there wasn't that physical representation of it

that's constantly there to remind her,

then it's my behaviour.

And I'm pretty good at putting on a happy face

and doing the best I can do.

The issue is

it's harder to lie about it now.

- Hello, Peter. - Andre.

Are you surprised to hear my voice?

- I'm delighted to hear your voice. - LAUGHTER

Oh, my God, where the fuck have you been?

- No, I'm kidding. - I've been trying to be available to you!

I know, I know, I know.

I'm absolutely joking.

It's been fucking tough, Peter.

- Like, we've entered that next phase of cancer. - Yeah.

And I met with a nurse who was just absolutely spectacular.

Like, the ass doctor.

And she told me I need to relax my second sphincter

because that's really tight

and that's where a lot of the blood's coming from.

- So... So I'm trying to do that. - Uh-huh.

I mean, you know...!

And what the last month and a half has been like is...

You know, when the girls have been here,

the girls sitting at the counter, eating dinner,

hanging out with their mother,

and I'm on the couch making jokes.

You know what I mean?

Trying to participate the way I used to.

But it's obvious that I'm not able to do what I used to do.

You know what I mean?

I'm not fooling anybody.

But I still feel that need to act that way.

When I can no longer make Tallula laugh,

then I feel like I've crossed over a line

and there's really no purpose for me to be here.

I don't know what I feel about that.

On the one hand, I get it.

You know? It is...

If you can't make Tallula laugh,

- you're not Andre anymore in some ways. - Right.

But I think you still feel you need to be able to make me laugh.

Yeah.

And I think you are more than...

...your irreverent humour.

So I think part of the process for you

is relaxing.

You mean my second sphincter?

- Yes. - Yes.

No, no, I'm sorry.

I don't mean to make a joke when you're telling me

not to fucking make jokes. LAUGHTER

I get it.

Yeah, I think you're right.

I think it's time to really be honest about the severity

of what's going on.

And I'm trying to write this little piece

for the end of the film

that sort of sums up where I am and what's going...

You know, whatever. I don't know what it's going to be.

And it's fascinating.

It's so weird to sit down and start writing,

you know, whatever that message is -

that final transmission.

Mm-hm.

But it's also forcing me to think about a lot of this stuff.

I just... It's so hard to see pain in the faces

of the people that I love, you know what I mean? It just...

It's so difficult for me to not feel like...

It's not even letting people down.

It's that I just don't want them to hurt.

And I know they have to.

And I know they're going to.

I understand that. But that doesn't mean they have to today.

You know?

- And... - Well... But...

I actually think...

...one of the gifts you offer your daughters...

...is the chance to grieve a father,

that that is not a destructive thing to do.

If it goes well, that is a powerful and deepening process.

I don't know.

It's sad, isn't it?

Be generous and let them feel sad.

Yes, that's true.

That's the line. That's the takeaway from this.

"Be generous and let them be sad."

Yes.

That's hard. That's really hard.

I know it is hard for you.

♪ Grab me by my shoulder blades

♪ And hang me out to dry

♪ I'm a mess

♪ And I need someone to help me out with that

♪ Please remember to feed the cat

♪ Please remember that I'm never coming back

♪ Ooh

♪ Ooh. ♪

Ow!

How do old people do this?

Isn't there an app for this?

Can't I do this on my iPhone?

There are a couple of these pills that I don't take every day.

Just because, you know, fuck it.

Right? Like, rules are for rule followers.

I just don't want to take 'em.

I don't know, it just doesn't feel right.

Like, taking two of those giant potassium pills every day

seems like too much.

Do I need that much potassium?

Does anybody need that much potassium?

Do that one all by itself!

Kind of hoping I was going to choke.

Looks like Vicodin but is not Vicodin,

and what a fucking letdown that was.

I usually have, as part of my medication,

a 7am bong hit as well.

Much better.

Stelio, would you like a bong hit?

- No, no. - Are you sure?

Yeah.

I mean, honestly, at this point,

if Andre were to get all earnest and heartfelt

and serious about his cancer

and about dying all the time...

...none of us would know how to deal with him.

You know? It's not him.

Hey, T, can you look in that cabinet

and see if there's any Skittles?

I got these holes in my hand

and, er, I've been trying to find the best hole

to hide Skittles in.

- Jesus Christ! - I think it's this one.

I think I'll do better there.

TALLULA LAUGHS That's good.

I just want to make people laugh.

You know? I just want to make people feel good when things are bad.

Do your new classes start today?

- Tomorrow? - No.

When do they start?

I haven't chosen it yet.

But I'm just going to take one.

Just one, so you can come home and see me

- and the holes in my hand? - Yeah.

Thank you. I appreciate that you're reducing your schedule

to spend time with me.

It's very sweet of you. TALLULA LAUGHS

It is.

- I'll see you later. - Goodbye. I love you.

Bye. I love you, too.

I haven't figured out the right way...

...to be a calming force with this new prognosis.

I don't know how to...

I guess I've just...

...had all this sort of anticipatory grief.

And now it's...

...really happening.

And my, you know,

cheerleader-hopeful-denial stuff is no longer appropriate.

And, you know, telling someone it's going to be OK...

...is sort of the natural way you want to comfort someone.

But it's not.

So...

So, what do you say?

I sat with fear today.

I didn't run from it or try to defeat it.

Instead, I greeted it like a friend

and I let it wash over me again and again...

...terrifying me.

But it was OK.

My fear is insignificant compared to the love all around me.

I wept for the first time in years.

It was remarkable.

I thought I needed suffering, but instead I got bliss.

My heart has never been more open,

and my fear of death,

also tapping at my window,

feels a bit more familiar and a little less powerful.

So long, suckers!

♪ I look back

♪ It had been a long night

♪ Sitting by the fire

♪ Soon it will be light

♪ It may only last a moment

♪ But a moment can last a lifetime in your mind

♪ I find it's on the telly

♪ What are they trying to sell me?

♪ Wake up

♪ Time's gone by

♪ I'm falling down

♪ Every night

♪ I look back

♪ It had been a long night

♪ Sitting by the fire

♪ Soon it will be light

♪ It may only last a moment

♪ But a moment can last a lifetime in your mind. ♪