Jeff Bridges new FX series, The Old Man, comes out next week. It’s an action thriller that also stars John Lithgow and Amy Brenneman (and a pair of Rottweilers). It’s about people trying to kill Jeff for things that happened in the past. The irony was that filming was paused due to Jeff’s actual fight for life, only it was his body trying to kill him with present day things happening. As we discussed, Jeff was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. While he was being treated for that, he contracted Covid from his treatment center. Although both tried to kill Jeff, neither were successful – thank goodness. Jeff talked about the fact that he really thought he was done while he was hospitalized with Covid. He said he was in “surrender mode” because he just couldn’t see a way to beat the disease. While speaking with CBS This Morning, Jeff elaborated about surrendering. He said he knows that “we’re all gonna die,” and he accepted this was probably how he was going out. Fortunately, once he turned a corner, he focused on walking his daughter Haley down the aisle to get himself better.

Though he’s now in remission and back in action with the new FX series The Old Man, Jeff Bridges is reflecting on the back-to-back health crises that saw him battling both non-Hodgkins lymphoma and COVID-19.

In a new interview with CBS Sunday Morning, the 72-year-old star shares how he struggled to breathe after testing positive for the coronavirus alongside wife Susan Geston, with whom he marks 45 years of marriage on June 5.

“My wife would ask, ‘Is he going to die?'” Bridges, who spent five weeks in the hospital compared to five days for Geston. “And they’d say, ‘We’re doing the best that we can.’ They wouldn’t reassure her that it was all going to be fine.”

He admitted that despite his doctors’ urging him to fight, he went into “surrender mode.”

“We’re all gonna die, man,” he explained. “Come on. We’re all going to get sick and die. And your friends are gonna die. That’s part of it.”

Despite his pain, the Crazy Heart actor did challenge himself to show up for his family. The star shares three daughters with Geston, the youngest of whom, Haley, got married just as his health turned a corner.

“I started getting better and my goal was walking Haley down the wedding aisle,” he shared. “I’d get to walk her down, and do a little wedding dance. It was really, really terrific.”

Ultimately, his health scare has helped Bridges find gratitude and new appreciation for the human condition.

“During my illness, we so often said, ‘That’s not really what I wanted; I wanted more of this,'” he said. “But just being alive, you know — seeing, hearing, feeling, touching … If COVID has taught us anything, it’s taught us that we’re all in this together, man. We’re all connected. and to feel that connection in the form of love coming at you, that’s something else.”

[From Yahoo!]

I’ve never smoked weed but I always felt like reading Jeff’s interviews is the closest I’m going to come to that kind of peace. He wraps such deep thoughts in such simple language making it relatable. His last paragraph about the breath of life that passes through each of us is quite profound when you sit with it a minute.

I understood what Jeff meant about being in surrender mode in his People interview but I appreciate the parameters Jeff puts on it here. He’d probably accepted his mortality when they discovered the tumor. We hear all the time that something is going to take us out. We know that to be fact. But it has to be something altogether different when that – whatever it is – is looking us in face. We still accept it, but we find out we aren’t as ready to go as we’d told ourselves. I didn’t realize that his wife Susan had gotten Covid at the same time as Jeff and was only sick for five days. That’s a rough comparison, too. She’s done in five days and he’s in the hospital five weeks, no wonder they thought this was it for Jeff.

How sweet that as soon as he made an improvement, Jeff clung to Haley’s wedding to get stronger. What a lovely goal to get better for, too.

Here’s Jeff’s CBS segment:

Embed from Getty Images

Photo credit: YouTube/CBS and Getty Images