Inspired

I just returned from Switzerland with my dear friend Cynthia as she walked through an extraordinary experience with incredible courage. This is her story to tell but with permission, I’m grateful to share how life changing it was for all of us.

Cynthia’s father had a stroke a few months ago and while visiting him at a rehab in Culver City he expressed to me he no longer wanted to live. I made him chocolate covered strawberries which he ate but didn’t really like as I tried to reflect back to him the things that were good in his life. After cheerleading for over an hour I happened to mention that Jean-Luc Godard was able to take his own life in Switzerland. Cynthia’s father lit up hearing this news and wanted to know more details. I casually Googled assisted death in Switzerland and a facility came up right away. Without a beat, he asked if I could forward the info to his daughter.

It was a process but every step of the way doors kept opening for this to really happen. A few weeks later Cynthia texted me to say, “He got accepted”. My heart sunk and yet, it somehow seemed right? I lost my father in 2009. I was in the middle of shooting my first feature, PERFECTION and he was living in a VA retirement facility in Canoga Park. My dad had alcoholic dementia and diabetes and I’d go and visit him once a week. He was anxious and would pace the hallways as if he was trying to find a way out. They locked the gates so people couldn’t wander off and every week my dad would get a little more despondent. They gave him a lot of medication and it broke my heart to see him so out of it. Eventually he stopped talking and then stopped eating and then he literally wasted away and died there. The thought of Cynthia’s father having the dignity to die the way he wanted felt better than what my dad had to endure.

Fathers and daughter relationships can be tricky. My father was kind, funny, smart, handsome and he was also super sensitive. He drank to protect himself from pain and most likely some childhood abuse he wasn’t able to heal in this lifetime. I felt loved by him and yet, because he was absent for long periods of my life I figured I wasn’t worth sticking around for. Cynthia had a complicated relationship with her dad too. He was also absent for chunks of her life and could be harsh to her in ways that felt unkind to say the least. Again, this is her story to tell but from my perspective, she didn’t deserve anything but love from him and gratefully she finally got his love in the end.

There’s a lot more details to their story but I wanted to share about how do we heal when it doesn’t look they way we think it should? I didn’t get to say good-bye to my father, he died alone and that makes me sad but it’s not the end of our story. My father shows up in my life in many ways. He was an actor and screenwriter like me and I know the experiences that inspire me are from the same sensitivity my father felt. I got sober in my twenties and that’s given me the opportunity to live my life with a freedom he didn’t have. To share this loss with Cynthia has been a profound privilege. It’s given me the gift of compassion, connection and love for the complicated and perfect relationships we have with our fathers. They say we pick our parents and if that’s true, I believe we picked well.

Before I left for Switzerland I was in a funk. Needless to say, there are so many reasons to feel heavy hearted in our current climate especially in the US. Being in Europe always makes me happy and getting a break from the political insanity for a week was nice. As Cynthia and I walked the streets of Basel it felt healing. She’d hit pockets of grief and I was able to witness her tears without trying to fix her. We ate Gelato, pizza and of course chocolate! We watched people swim down the Rhine River with these cool plastic bags that hold their belongings. We took a train for lunch in France, we went to the Tinguely museum and walked into an amazing exhibition by Julian Charrière called Midnight Zone. The room was dark, people were laying on the large cushions looking up at the ceiling so we laid down too.

In the eponymous film Midnight Zone (2025), a lighthouse Fresnel lens—a device meant to guide from a distance—is inverted and lowered into the abyss. Shot using a remotely operated deep-sea vehicle, the descent is both literal and metaphysical: a journey into a space that resists orientation, where polymetallic nodules—objects of industrial desire—rest amid ancient ecologies. Light here does not reveal; it fractures. The work hovers between dreams, illuminating the blind spots in our pursuit of progress. It was mediative as we watched this film drifting in and out of consciousness.

I met Cynthia at an acting class in the 1980’s. She was the star of the class while I was hiding in the back of the theatre with dyed red hair trying not to be noticed while recovering from heroin. Turns out, we both drove cars that had gray primer. Mine was a ford Torino my dad gave me with no seat belts and guzzled gas and Cynthia had an orange VW bug. She invited me to lunch one day after class and we went to The Source on Sunset being that we were both vegetarians. She told me there was a vacant room in her apartment off Fairfax and that I should move in and can be actresses and waitresses like her and her roommate Ruthie. I would still be living with my mother in the valley if it wasn’t for Cynthia.

I was afraid Cynthia might not be able to handle all of the current stress but I’ve been amazed to watch her walk through this time with so much wisdom and grace. I’m impressed at how she’s reached out to all her friends to let them into her process and I’m honored she allowed me to be an intimate part of this healing. Having parents leave the planet creates a different reality, like a club no one wants to belong to. It’s not like being orphaned, I see it as a rite of passage.

Inspiration isn’t always about creative projects. It’s how life continues to unfold in ways I could never predict. I can’t say this trip was a vacation but it definitely gave me a shift in perception that feels inspiring.

This life is a gift and I’m so grateful to be here for all of it!

xo