I Can't Stop Thinking About Gene Hackman

On a celebrity's passing and what it says about us.

In 2023, I watched a documentary that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival called The Eternal Memory. The film tells the story of Chilean journalist Augusto Góngora and his wife, actress Paulina Urrutia, who have been a couple for decades. Eight years ago, Augusto was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. The movie follows them as they attempt to maintain their relationship, all while Pauli becomes Augusto’s caretaker. The Eternal Memory would go on to win a Sundance Grand Jury prize.

I’d always understood at a deep level that Alzheimer’s is really challenging for a significant other to deal with. Many patients end up in an assisted living facility rather than being cared for at home by a spouse. But to be candid, most of my understanding of the disease came from popular culture. I knew that Alzheimer’s sufferers forget details about their lives — a heartbreaking prospect for a loved one. It wasn’t until I watched The Eternal Memory that I got a glimpse of just how challenging day-to-day life is. It’s not just your spouse forgetting your name and/or the experiences you’ve had together. It’s them getting agitated and screaming at you at all hours of the day. It’s them getting angrily fixated on a certain object or situation that is completely irrelevant or non-existent, and not being able to shake that fixation. It’s them being unable to perform the basic functions of life without some kind of assistance. It’s a near-complete loss of autonomy and the clarity of mind that one expects from a regular existence.

The movie is excellent and ultimately has an uplifting message about love triumphing over body and circumstance. But it’s a painful journey to get there.

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I couldn’t help but think of The Eternal Memory as I read about Gene Hackman and his wife Betsy Arakawa passing the other day. The details are haunting. From the Associated Press:

Forensic experts came to a heartrending conclusion Friday about the manner of death for actor Gene Hackman: he died of heart disease with complications from Alzheimer’s disease on an empty stomach a week after a rare, rodent-borne disease took the life of his wife at their home in Santa Fe.

The partially mummified remains of Hackman, 95, and Betsy Arakawa, 65, were discovered Feb. 26 when maintenance and security workers showed up at the home and alerted police.

Authorities unraveled the mysterious circumstances and revealed that Arakawa likely died Feb. 11 at home from hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, a rare but potentially fatal disease spread by infected rodent droppings.

Hackman, in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s, apparently was unaware that his wife was dead.

Hackman is one of the greatest actors of my lifetime, and likely one of the most beloved. His performances in films as varied as Unforgiven, Superman, Crimson Tide, and The Royal Tenenbaums cemented his status as a versatile performer who nonetheless brought a working-man-style gravitas to every role. His work was hugely influential to me as a young cinephile and probably helped to get me into movies in the first place.

I have a better understanding of Alzheimer’s now than I did a few years ago, so I can understand why things played out in the way they did for Hackman and Arakawa. But still, the idea that Hackman died at home, likely unaware that his wife had also been dead for a week in the house with him, is deeply upsetting. Here is a man who at one point was one of the biggest movie stars in the world, unable to care for himself or even comprehend what was happening — and with no one to come to his aid. The circumstances made me wonder about his existence in Santa Fe, New Mexico. What was his community like? Why didn’t anyone notice something was wrong when Hackman and his wife hadn’t been seen in awhile? I am not at all implying anything suspicious was afoot; I merely wonder how removed and isolated they must have been in order for their deaths to play out like this.

Hackman and Arakawa’s passing has made me reflect on how we consider the elderly in our society. As an Asian immigrant, I have often reflected on how brutally old people are treated here. In Chinese culture, older family members are revered and they often cohabitate with their children and grandchildren. They are seen as a font of wisdom and respect must be accorded to them. In America, the prevailing culture is one that discards the elderly and pushes them out of sight. This is evident in both the capitalistic sense, where ageism is rampant, and in the cultural sense, where we try to pretend old people don’t really exist (They made a whole movie about it even).

A CNN article in 2024 tried to explore why nobody seemed to care that older people were still dying of COVID in substantial numbers.

“Everyone loves their own parents. But as a society, we don’t value older adults or the people who care for them,” said Robert Kramer, 74, co-founder and strategic adviser at the National Investment Center for Seniors Housing & Care.

Kramer thinks boomers are reaping what they have sown. “We have chased youth and glorified youth. When you spend billions of dollars trying to stay young, look young, act young, you build in an automatic fear and prejudice of the opposite.”

Combine the fear of diminishment, decline and death that can accompany growing older with the trauma and fear that arose during the pandemic, and “I think Covid has pushed us back in whatever progress we were making in addressing the needs of our rapidly aging society. It has further stigmatized aging,” said John Rowe, 79, professor of health policy and aging at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.

If our elderly were more deeply integrated into our society, would Gene Hackman and Betsy Arakawa’s passing have played out differently? I obviously can’t say. But it’s something I can’t stop thinking about.

I don’t really have a grand conclusion here. I’m just sad that a brilliant actor and his wife died, and equally sad that the way in which they died was so isolated, lonely, and tragic. I wish Gene Hackman and Betsy Arakawa could have been surrounded by people who loved them and cared for them right until the end. And for Hackman himself, I just hope, at one point (probably long ago), he at least understood how much his work meant to all of us.