An Open Letter to Jeff Bridges; Or, Eff You, Cancer: A Personal Essay
Trigger warning: terminal illness.
Dear Mr. Bridges,
This both a letter and a story. But it’s all important.
“Oh, look at this picture of X.” My mother puts her hand to her heart, her voice shaking.
She and I are sitting together on the couch: me lying down, my mother at my feet, scrolling through emails on her phone. It is past 11pm, and we’ve just finished watching an episode of The X-Files — a recent obsession of mine and a past obsession of hers, which we now share.
X isn’t our friend’s real name, of course. X is the daughter of close family friends who I still picture as a child with huge blue eyes and a mischievous smile. X was diagnosed with Hodgkins Lymphoma recently and just finished chemo. X is only sixteen. I look at the picture on my mother’s phone. She is so beautiful.
“I’m going to knit her a hat,” my mother announces. “Y told me that X wants one for this summer.” Y is the mother, a woman I remember as elegant and tall, incredibly generous, and imbued with so much love that it expands to fill whichever room she is in, enveloping everyone present in a hug. The last time I saw X and Y was years even before Covid. Before I went to college, I think.
Lymphoma. It jogs my memory. I instinctively pull out my phone and go to Jeff Bridges’s website, clicking on the updates page. The update is from January. I’m surprised by how long it’s been since I’ve checked this page. I scroll through it, reading his handwritten notes and smiling at his drawings. At the end, there is a video of him singing a song about friendship and love . I play it out loud.
“Who is this?” my mother asks. She is a music buff and doesn’t recognize the voice.
“It’s Jeff Bridges,” I tell her.
“Oh,” she says, her voice breaking again. We let the song play through.
“I wish I could tell Jeff Bridges how important he is to me,” I say.
“You can,” my mother replies. “Write him a letter.”
I can remember the first time I watched The Big Lebowski. I was fourteen or fifteen, and I was in a bad mood — my parents, film buffs as well as music buffs, had chosen the movie we were to watch that night, and I was expecting something avant-garde and complicated. I wasn’t feeling up for that kind of film — I typically didn’t understand them. Plus, I was mired in teenage moodiness. My parents reassured me that this was a Coen brothers movie, therefore very good and not the kind of film they usually frustrated me with. The most recent Coen brothers film I’d seen at that point was Miller’s Crossing, and it had made me incredibly sad for the rest of the night. I wasn’t feeling up for anything like that, either.
But when the movie started, Sam Elliot’s voice drawled about the Queen’s underwear, and the camera panned in on Jeff Bridges in The Dude’s notorious robe smelling a carton of milk, I immediately felt (that deep-inside-you feeling that emerges from inside your ribcage) that The Big Lebowski would be one of my favorite movies ever.
In truth, that was not the first film I’d seen Jeff Bridges in, but The Big Lebowski is the first film that I can recall loving him for. A year or two prior, I’d watched True Grit at a family member’s house. I’d enjoyed it thoroughly, and my dad had introduced Marshal Rooster Cogburn as the ingenious Jeff Bridges. It was also a Coen brothers film, but I didn’t understand what that meant, at least not yet. I start this essay with The Big Lebowski and not True Grit because it is still my favorite movie, and it’s the Jeff Bridges movie that has had the biggest impact on me. The Big Lebowski is the first movie from which I remember Jeff Bridges’s name. I’ve used The Big Lebowski quotes in my school essays, sneaking in tiny phrases for fun. I was inspired to read more about nihilism in high school because of Uli the nihilist. In my high school U.S. History class, we watched a documentary about Lewis and Clark that was narrated by a familiar voice. “That’s Jeff Bridges!” I exclaimed out loud, in wonder. My teacher laughed and confirmed my observation.
But perhaps more importantly, The Big Lebowski is a movie I share with my family — we all love it, we all love Jeff Bridges, and we all quote from it at least twice per week. My parents will say during our arguments, “Calmer than you, Dude” or “Calmer than you are,” which unfortunately usually ends up making me even more enraged — they use my favorite movie against me. We regular say that someone is a good man—and thorough. We watch the film at least twice per year, usually when there’s a friend visiting who hasn’t seen it yet or when one of us says, “It’s been too long since we’ve watched The Big Lebowski.” And my dearest friends love the movie, too — we can watch it together and text one another quotes and references.
The Big Lebowski is also dear to me as a comfort movie, especially in the last year or so while the pandemic has ravaged the country and my family is locked down together. But in the last few years, not just recently, I’ve needed a lot of comfort—the reasons for which are disproportionately due to cancer. During my first semester of college (Fall 2018), my maternal grandfather was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. The first day of college my second semester, my paternal grandfather died suddenly from a cancer none of us knew he had. That summer, an aunt was diagnosed with breast cancer (she has since recovered). Right before Covid struck the United States, my maternal grandfather passed away. My uncle is in remission from eye cancer. My beloved family dog, who was our support system and mine and my brother’s fiercest defender, passed away from cancer almost two months ago. My grandmother is a breast cancer and lung cancer survivor. Cancer has brandished a very hard hand at my family. And I’m fucking terrified of it.
Last year, at the dinner table one night, my parents gently broke the news of Jeff Bridges’s lymphoma diagnosis to me. I’d found out earlier that day from a friend, but my parents’ loving tone of voice hit me just as hard. I put my head in my hands. Of all people, Jeff Bridges? Our comfort through all of the shit that had recently come to light (if you will) — he was diagnosed with cancer, too? It wasn’t fair — it isn’t fair.
And now our family friend’s daughter, only sixteen, is diagnosed with lymphoma. Cancer has no mercy. None at all.
We’ve been keeping up with Jeff Bridges’s fight against cancer. My mom keeps track of his Instagram and I check his website regularly (I feel obligated to mention that I’ve had Instagram off my phone since last summer — an anomalous action for a gen-z-er). Even though we don’t know Jeff Bridges personally, for us, his fight against cancer is still personal. It feels like another friend is suffering, even if we’ve never communicated with this friend before, even if this friend doesn’t know us. It feels like if Jeff Bridges can be okay, we can be okay, too. My grieving family, our suffering friends—we can all have some hope.
It seems like Jeff Bridges is recovering steadily. We don’t need any other information — it’s a breach of privacy, and we understand how intimate cancer is. Just knowing that Jeff Bridges is out there yet another day, listening to music and seeing his loved ones, is a blessing in and of itself.
So Mr. Bridges, if you ever read this letter — if the internet connects us somehow, as it does for some very lucky people — I want you to know how important you are to me. I want you to know just how much joy and comfort you’ve brought to myself and my family. We treasure every joke and every expression of love you’ve shared with the world. And I want you to know that all of us are cheering you on, every single day. We know how hard it is. And if it’s possible for you to know that one more person, one more family out there appreciates you deeply, that is enough for me.
With all of my love,
Lydia Imber Shaw
