Up Till Now: The Autobiography

the worst moment of my life being used as a form of entertainment was extraordinarily painful.
    Irresponsible people made accusations or tried to create suspicion. I guess the question asked most often was why did I call 911 before diving into the pool to try to save her? For a long time I’d wondered about that myself. Why didn’t I dive right in? It took me years to fully understand, and even then it was only because of myfourth wife, Elizabeth. Every year on August 9 we would go up to the pool in the evening to try to understand what happened. The moon is in the same position, the lights are the same. On one of those August nights I stood there with Elizabeth looking at the pool and suddenly I knew. The water in the pool had been still. That’s why I didn’t immediately know she was there. There wasn’t a ripple. Any movement in the pool agitates the water, it moves and continues moving long after it has been agitated. When I looked at the pool that night it was placid. Still. And somehow I had known that whether I dove in and rescued the body and then called 911, or called 911 and then rescued the body, it would have made no difference. Obviously it wasn’t a conscious thought, but had there been any sign of life I know exactly what I would have done.
    Other people talk about problems in our marriage. There was only one problem: alcohol.
    I don’t think you ever really get over an event like that. You deal with the grief, then as that passes you absorb the substance and it becomes part of you. For a while you think about it every day, and then a little less, and a little less, and then a word or a place triggers a memory. But we go on. No matter how awful, we go on. The only positive thing that came out of it was the Nerine Shatner Foundation. I was able to raise several hundred thousand dollars in her memory, which was used to finance the Nerine Shatner Friendly House, a place where women with addictions can go and be safe and try to recover. Nerine had often said that when she was finally sober she wanted to help other women fighting the same battles. Friendly House had taken her in when she needed a place, and in 2001 we were able to help them open a twenty-four-bed facility in Los Angeles. Several times since then I’ve had people tell me that the facility made a difference in their lives. I hope so.
    Still, I can never think about Nerine or talk about her without feeling pain, and I live with an appreciation for the woman she was and regret for the person she could have been had she not had this incredible flaw—and I will never believe it was her fault.
    I had believed that the force of my love for her was enough toeffect a cure, I couldn’t imagine that it wasn’t enough, but to my sorrow I learned that sometimes love is not enough.
    I did write a song about Nerine that was part of my album, Has Been . It was called “What Have You Done?” It ended:
My love was supposed to protect her
It didn’t
My love was supposed to heal her
It didn’t
You had said don’t leave me
And I begged you not to leave me
We did

TEN

    My name is Lisbeth Shatner. I wanted to tell you a great story, another this-is-Dad-in-a-nutshell story. When Nerine was still alive he took the whole family on an amazing trip to Botswana. I know he got some sort of discount on the tickets, I believe he bought an African safari for two people at an auction, so he paid much less than the regular cost. Then he decided he should share this trip with his three daughters and their significant others. “That was the reason the company donated the trip,” he pointed out. “They expect you to do that. I didn’t want to let them down.”
He wanted to go to Botswana because its government concluded a long time ago that keeping their animals alive and in their natural habitat is good business because it draws tourists. The terrain in Botswana goes from desert to savannah to rain forest to swampland. They have giant waterholes around which animals congregate. So it’s an ideal place to see a lot of beautiful wild animals. But it also can be very dangerous. For some reason they don’t attack humans in an open car; they don’t recognize it as prey, so lions literally come right up to the front fender. But if you get out of the car you can die. They continually remind people not to get out of the car for any reason. People have gotten out of their car to take a picture and been killed. And the guides don’t want anyone dying in their