Last week, I was sitting in a hospital waiting room, monitoring my husband’s status on a screen that provides alerts to waiting family members so they’ll know when to expect their loved one to emerge. Each patient is assigned a number, and you can watch as the person’s number progresses through color-coded phases: Pink for Pre-Op, Orange for OR, Blue for Post-Op, Green for Recovery. After a short time in Recovery, assuming all goes well, a smiling volunteer taps you on the shoulder and asks you to follow her to the recovery room, where your post-operative spouse or parent or friend is sitting comfortably in a chair, still wearing a hospital gown and fuzzy socks, sipping Coke over ice and eating graham crackers.
I was reading The Woman in White as I waited, because Nora Ephron told me to read that book, and where books are concerned, I generally do whatever Nora tells me to do. As I read, I overheard a conversation between two fellow waiting room occupants. “How old was he?” the woman asked.
“Eighty-two,” said the man. “But you’d never have known it to look at him. He looked more like 62.”
“Oh, that’s terrible,” said the woman. Terrible that the man died, I suppose, not that he apparently looked decades younger than he was.
“Yeah, it was so unexpected,” said the man. “He was out for a run, and he had a sudden heart attack. He was gone by the time the paramedics arrived.”
“Terrible,” said the woman. “I guess we never know.”
******
Nora Eprhon writes about death in “Considering the Alternative,” the last essay in I Feel Bad About My Neck (which was much better than I described it, by the way--take all of my literary criticism with great crusty grains of salt). To paraphrase, she writes about our tendency to think of death as a remote contingency, a possibility that we should maybe, possibly be prepared for; rather than what it is--an absolute certainty; a when, not an if; the end that waits for every single one of us. Eventually, sooner or later, we’re all going to die.
Nora would have been amused, I think, about the apparent shock with which the 82-year-old jogger’s friend reacted to his sudden death. A sudden death is of course always a shock, but that an 82-year-old man dying of a heart attack during a run should provoke such disbelief speaks to a universal human tendency to pretend that death is something that only happens to other people, other people who should have taken better care of themselves.
*****
You know what else was going on on the very same day? It was apparently National Handbag Day. This should be the most important of national holidays from my perspective but I wouldn’t even have known about it if I hadn’t been in a hospital. Because a hospital is the only place where I’d ever watch the Today show; much less the third or fourth hour of the Today show, and that’s where I learned that it was National Handbag Day. Thank God, I can imagine the Today show producers saying to each other. It’s National Handbag Day, so we can do show and tell with the contents of Craig Melvin’s backpack and Dylan Dreyer’s tote bag (which was a mess, by the way--throw away your used tissues, girl). For all I know, the producers of the Today show made the whole thing up, just so they could fill a few minutes of the hours and hours of air time that the Today show occupies. It must be exhausting to work for the Today show. Relentless.
Anyway, there it was, National Handbag Day, when I had just read Nora’s essay “I Hate My Purse.” We had a doctor with what had to have been a surgically altered neck, a TV personality whose purse was an even bigger mess than Nora’s (really--don’t put chewed-up gum in your handbag, even if it’s wrapped in paper--just throw it away) and a real-life proof of Nora’s theorem about people’s reluctance to accept the inevitability of death. It was a little eerie.
Nora Ephron so disliked handbags that she didn’t even carry one when she had enough pockets to carry her essentials. Nora was right about a lot of things. In fact, she knew enough that she could write about my day 13 years before it happened. But she was dead wrong about handbags. I love pockets, but there’s nothing like a handbag. Thanks to my new favorite handbag (Longchamp Le Pliage in my favorite wine color) I was able to carry my wallet, phone, little cosmetic case, rosary, lip balm, keys, Kindle, and pen and notebook; and I still had plenty of room for all of the stuff that my husband had to hand over before they rolled him away. There was room for a water bottle. There was room for the prescriptions that we picked up at the pharmacy before we went home. I clipped my keys to the straps with a carabiner, but I could have also stuffed them inside if I needed to.
Nora hated her purse because she had the wrong purse. There’s no other reason that I can think of to hate something that’s so obviously an undisputed good. A good handbag is pretty, it carries everything you need, and it gives you something to do with your hands. An undisputed good.
*****
Not long ago, I tried to re-create a favorite childhood dish. It didn’t turn out as I’d hoped, but it was OK. I wrote a whole thing about it, actually, and then forgot about it. I have a pretty big backlog of drafts. I wrote about that, too. Everything is copy. That’s what Nora said. Unsurprisingly, Nora also wrote about food nostalgia, in “The Lost Strudel,” because every time I think I’m writing about something new, I find that Nora has beaten me to it.
Apparently, there is a thing called cabbage strudel. Nora described it and it sounds delicious. It was sold at Hungarian bakeries all over New York City until one day, tastes abruptly shifted and cabbage strudel was no longer a fashionable food. Nora was heartbroken. She hunted in vain for her beloved strudel but it was gone until a few years later, when a friend told her that a new Hungarian bakery had opened. The new bakery sold cabbage strudel and it was just as good as Nora remembered. A happy ending.
Maybe my next attempt to re-create a favorite childhood food will be successful, but not today. Today we’re having leftovers. I don’t think that Nora Ephron had anything to say about leftovers, but I’m about to read I Remember Nothing, so I’ll find out for sure. If she didn’t write about leftovers, then I will. Everything is copy.
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