It is with a sad and heavy heart that I report on Liam Scheff’s last “letter” to friends. Update: Sadly we have lost him, may he rest in peace.
For those of you who don’t know, over the last year, Liam has been struggling with the effects of “prolonged, painful, invasive dentistry” gone wrong. While doctors aren’t exactly sure what happened or what’s wrong, he is suffering mightily from “the sudden onset of a rather brutalizing neuromuscular illness, looking more and more like a cerebellar stroke.”
He says,
“I don’t want any wishes to get better; they’re only tiring at this point. I’ve been fighting this for a year on every front. I’m no pushover and have fought mightily, with energy that I no longer have, with health that has been diminished by the many months….
What happened is in my brain. It happened close to a year ago, during prolonged, painful, invasive dentistry. (Don’t send me your dentist’s information, I don’t need it. I don’t have metal or mercury or any other thing in my teeth or system). What I have is something that no one can seem to fix; not even me. No matter what I do, or try, or wish, or pray, or eat, or …
I’ve kept myself alive by forcing my body to walk a mile or two or three daily, even at my worst, even when I had to use a cane because my left side was giving up. I managed to force that, or train that, or .. something…into a kind of responsive state. But my ears don’t respond the same way. And it’s there, deep in my skull, vibrating the calcium holding in the thick, mushy tissue, that something is broken.
Something broke, something in my brain, my cerebellum, my hearing center. I’m not the only one in the world with this problem. Many people have “tinnitus.” A noise that they can hear if they really listen for it. But that’s not what I have when I lay down at night.
I have an electric sander working the inside of my skull; I have a hornets nest somewhere inside and behind my left ear and a small siren in my right. Night is most often much worse than day, and requires such a heaping handful of pills to try to convince the central nervous system to ignore it….well, more on that in a moment.
I’ve had one very belligerent now ex-facebook friend laugh in my digital face about what a pussy I must be to allow tinnitus to bother me. But tinnitus isn’t a word that means “a little annoying noise that you can tune out.” It’s a catch-all word, like “autism,” or “brain damage,” or “eccentric” that can mean so many things, from the benignly or vaguely annoying to the catastrophically unforgiving and life-threatening.”
Sadly, Liam has felt for some time that due to this neuro issue, he is not long for this world. It is coming:
“You’re going to have to miss me, because I’m not going to be around for much longer. I’ve already been missing you, and life, for a year. I’ve missed friends, activities, life, me, the me I always thought was the eternal me – I’ve missed that guy, who could bounce back from anything and go on with another project, a flight of fancy, a dive into the depths of another untapped or curiously verboten topic…to try to find what wriggled under the stones, what swan in the depths beneath the glistening, holographic surface.”
Liam leaves this world a YouTube channel full of videos, interviews with Ty Bollinger from The Truth About Cancer, other notable interviews, films, hundreds of essays and articles, and two books: “Official Stories,” and “The Truth About Love.” He also wrote a play.
He reports that what he really wants to do is have a huge party and invite his friends from all over the world. And then, once the party was over, he’d have the right to “drink my cup of hemlock and end all pain and suffering. If we were an honorable society, we’d allow people to do this.” However, “It’s illegal. The government owns your birth, life and your death.” So because of that truth, he reminds us to live:
“Don’t be a cog in the machine, goddamn it. Goddamn the machine. Make sure to challenge the perceptions; make sure to breathe deeply. Make sure to tell your loved ones that you love them. Easy to say, not impossible to do.”
At this point, no one knows when the end is coming, including Liam, he just feels it…perhaps the way we feel things we know to be true. Our friend seems to have worked out how he feels about death and is ready to go, quietly. He is ready to take that next step into the unknown and thanks his family, friends, and “fans” for “this strange adventure.”
In closing, he asks us:
“If you hear of my departure, please celebrate my work. If you hear of my departure, please share with a friend that you are so pleased to have them, because those conversations shared late at night, or in the quiet moment in an afternoon walk, or in bustling transit to and from “important events” – those are the moments. This is the marrow of living. The space between what’s advertised…the sly, mirthful smiles, the sly recognition of the self-same humanity in another….what is life but the poetry of a moment unadorned by description, living itself out naturally, rolling out of its own desire to simply be?
I hesitate, again, to publish this, because then comes the flood; advice, well-wish, remorse, sadness, pleading, help offered if… and so on. And I can’t answer you. I’m too busy surviving minutes and hours.
But if you send love, send it to the sky, to the moon; share it with your people, and thank you for being my, and each other’s friends.”
We will update you when Liam has passed. Our prayers are with him now.
Source: Liam Scheff
