UpBeat Living: Roger Ebert on Remaking His Voice

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Cancer, Gratitude, irrepressible, positivity, Roger Ebert, Upbeat, UpBeat Living

© 2013 Kebba Buckley Button.  World Rights Reserved.

Roger Ebert 2002
Photo by Andrew Sullivan

In the previous post, UpBeat Living celebrated the irrepressible, upbeat nature and achievements of Roger Ebert, who sadly passed away on April 4^th.  Today, we celebrate his final project, Remaking My Voice.

Known primarily as the most authentic and truly blunt film critic to grace our TV screens, Ebert had been a chatty communicator since at least grade school.  In first grade, he was told he talked too much.  By High School, he was a reporter serving the school newspaper.  By age 25, he was working for the Chicago Sun-Times.  He continued to work for the Sun-Times in various media until his death.  He used his voice for radio, television, and movies.

In what could have been seen as a tragedy, Ebert went on to lose his physical voice in 2006.  Cancer surgery made it impossible for him to talk.  After an apparently successful operation to rebuild his jaw, Ebert thought he was going back to work in a few weeks.  He had pre-taped six weeks of programs.  However, one day his carotid artery—the huge artery that runs along the side of the side of the neck, behind the jaw, and up into the brain— burst. His doctor said he had never seen anyone survive a carotid artery rupture. Ebert then spent a year in the hospital and had six more ruptures of the carotid.  The team gave up on reconstruction of the jaw.  His physical voice was done.  Ebert would later write: “[H]uman speech is an ingenious manipulation of our breath, within the sound chamber of our mouth and respiratory system.  We need to be able to hold and manipulate that breath, in order to form sounds.”  He could no longer do that.  But he was still sparkling, animated, and funny.

Now this dynamo simply accelerated into new forms of expression, as well as greatly stepping up his writing via blogs and Twitter.  He began “speaking” by keyboarding at a computer that spoke for him.   Saying he had always taken for granted the ability to speak, Ebert presented a TED talk in 2011 (www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNXOVpN8Wgg).  Sitting with his wife and three friends, they shared the narrative and Ebert finished with a joke, which he keyboarded into a laptop that spoke for him.

Ebert’s final message to those of us “listening”:  “[W]hat you see is not all you get!”  To attempt rebuilding his jaw, surgeons had harvested bone from his shoulders, which actually affected not only his shoulder profile, but also the way he walked.  Now missing a jaw altogether, Ebert had an unusual face shape.  He found that people would stare, and some would assume he was deaf, then shouting to him.  Only his physical voice was missing.  Through technology, he had found his greater voice, and he could express himself more and better than ever.  In his TED talk, Ebert did not talk about gratitude for life as such, but he expressed it, in his lively ebullience and his obvious love for communication, for his wife, and for his friends.  This was a man who truly lived.

Roger Ebert:  a voice for the ages.  Let us continue to hear him and his message.

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UpBeat Living: Two Thumbs Up, Roger Ebert!

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Celebrating the good, enjoy, living beyond, positivity, Roger Ebert, The life you want, UpBeat Living

© 2013 Kebba Buckley Button.  World Rights Reserved.

 

Photo by Microsoft

This column, UpBeat Living,  is about celebrating life.   It’s about accentuating the positive in our words and attitudes, in our choices of friends, colleagues and projects.  It’s about turning any negativity into constructive response.  It’s about converting “stress” into worthy choices and forward motion, turning problems into projects.

Today, UpBeat Living celebrates a man who robustly lived a life in forward motion: Roger Ebert. This famous film critic helped define that profession and set standards many are still trying to meet.  With his authenticity and ability to make his points clearly and succinctly, Roger Ebert stood alone.

It’s hard for me to remember a time in movie history when Siskel and Ebert were not on the air.  I’m sure, during the Silent Movie Days, they were there already, with closed captioning or hand-held signs, giving us their honest and well-considered opinions.  Picture them on the silent screen, sitting opposite each other, and holding a sign up with one hand, holding a thumb up or down with the other hand.  A piano would be playing in the background, urgently if they were arguing, and lyrically, if the two were in agreement.  Today, it’s silence only, for the two great movie critics.

Gene Siskel died in 1999, and Roger Ebert died on April 4th.  The two began working together, hosting a PBS TV show, reviewing movies, in 1975– a bit after the days of silent movies–  taking it to syndication in 1982.  Siskel stayed until 3 weeks before his death.  Ebert wept on air in the next episode, as he saluted Siskel and their partnership, then continued forging his creative path.

Whatever stage of life Roger Ebert was in, he went at it with gusto.  He began life as a movie critic with the Chicago Sun-Times in 1967 and still wrote for them until his death.  He would eventually author 20 books and hundreds of columns, co-create countless television episodes for film reviews, visit Sesame Street a few times, author screenplays, and give a TED talk. Even after he was diagnosed with thyroid and salivary cancer in 2002, he lived with the condition with grace.  He kept smiling, and his eyes were bright with passion.  After surgery in 2006, he finally lost his jaw, his ability to speak and his ability to eat.  Unrecognizable from the square-faced man we had seen for many years, he still seemed to smile all the time, and his eyes danced with joy.

Roger Ebert celebrated his life with his wife, attorney Chaz Hammelsmith Ebert, whom he married in 1992.  She has said their life was better than any movie.  In recent years, Roger Ebert spoke through his blog, his 800,000-follower Twitter account, and a voice-synthesizing computer.  He exuded enthusiasm, wonder, and happiness.  Once he lost his physical voice, he wrote and presented a Ted talk about the importance of “voice” on different levels of life (www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNXOVpN8Wgg).  So the man who made his name using his voice to talk about films had created his most important work, a film, without using his voice.

My review of his film:  Excellent!  Two thumbs up.  You will long inspire us, Roger!

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● Kebba Buckley Button is a corporate stress management trainer and the author of the award-winning book, Discover The Secret Energized You (on Amazon.com at (http://tinyurl.com/b44v3br) , and the 2012 book, Peace Within:  Your Peaceful Inner Core (on Amazon.com at http://tinyurl.com/abd47jr).  She also has a natural healing practice and is an ordained minister.

● Your comments are welcome!

● Get these articles by email– just click the Subscribe Free option in the right column.

● Reach the writer at kebba@kebba.com .