Unscripted

Gene Hackman controlled every scene, except his last

Gene Hackman’s Last Week: The Exit He Didn’t Choose

I keep thinking about Gene Hackman.

Not just because of what happened to him but also because of how much he shaped the movies I watched. I looked through his list of roles and realized I’d seen at least a dozen of them—The French Connection, Hoosiers, Unforgiven, The Conversation.

Winning his second Oscar

In every role and every performance, he brought something grounded and real. He wasn’t flashy. He wasn’t larger-than-life. He was life.

And then, one day, he left.

Not in the way most actors do. No long goodbye, no farewell tour, no slow fade into irrelevance. He just walked away. Retired from Hollywood, moved to Santa Fe, spent his days painting, sculpting, playing golf. He became a man outside of the thing that had defined him for decades.

I respected that.

But now, I can’t stop thinking about his last week.

The Story We Don’t Get to Write

For most of his life, Hackman controlled his own narrative. He knew when to leave, and he chose his exit.

But life doesn’t always honor the scripts we write for ourselves.

Hackman and Betsy Arakawa

His wife, Betsy Arakawa, was his anchor, partner, and primary caregiver, who held everything together. Then one day, she collapsed at home, suddenly struck down by a brutal, rare illness. And Gene, 95 years old, deep in the fog of Alzheimer’s, was left alone in that house with her body.

Seven days passed. No calls for help. No signs he even realized what had happened.

Did he understand she was gone? Did he sit at the dinner table waiting for her to bring him a plate? Did he wander the house, searching for something he couldn’t name? Or was he lost in the shifting tides of his mind, time slipping past without an anchor?

The man who had once commanded every scene, who had always known how to own the moment, was now trapped in one he had no control over. The walls closed in. The world shrank. And then, he too was gone.

The Illusion of Control

We spend our lives trying to shape our stories, believing we can decide how things will go.

Gene Hackman did that. He played his roles his way. He walked away on his terms. But in the end, none of that mattered. Because the end isn’t something we always get to choose.

I know that feeling—the sudden shock when life abruptly changes, leaving you trapped, powerless, wondering who you are if you’re no longer the person you used to be.

That’s what stays with me.

We make plans. We tell ourselves we’ll decide when it’s time to stop, when it’s time to step back, when it’s time to go. But life doesn’t always work like that.

Sometimes, the story takes over. Sometimes, the final act isn’t ours to write.

So what do we do?

We live fully while we can. We take our moments and wring every bit of meaning from them. We don’t assume there will always be more time, more choices, more chances to say what we need to say or do what we need to do.

Because the story will end one day.

And the only thing we can control is how present we are while it’s still being written.

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