I Feel Bad About My Neck (13 page)

Authors: Nora Ephron

BOOK: I Feel Bad About My Neck

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Just the other day I went shopping at a store in Los Angeles that happens to stock jeans that actually come all the way up to my waist, and I was stunned to discover that the customer just before me was Nancy Reagan. That’s how old I am: Nancy Reagan and I shop in the same store.

Anyway, I said to this editor, you’re wrong, you are so wrong, this is not
our
day, this is
their
day. But she was undaunted. She said to me, well then, I have another idea: Why don’t you write about Age Shame? I said to her, get someone who is only fifty to write about Age Shame. I am way past Age Shame, if I ever had it. I’m just happy to be here at all.

Anyway, the point is, I don’t know why so much nonsense about age is written—although I can certainly understand that no one really wants to read anything that says aging sucks. We are a generation that has learned to believe we can do something about almost everything. We are active—hell, we are proactive. We are positive thinkers. We have the power. We will take any suggestion seriously. If a pill will help, we will take it. If being in the Zone will help, we will enter the Zone. When we hear about the latest ludicrously expensive face cream that is alleged to turn back the clock, we will go out and buy it even though we know that the last five face creams we fell for were completely ineffectual. We will do crossword puzzles to ward off Alzheimer’s and eat six almonds a day to ward off cancer; we will scan ourselves to find whatever can be nipped in the bud. We are in control. Behind the wheel. On the cutting edge. We make lists. We seek out the options. We surf the net.

But there are some things that are absolutely, definitively, entirely uncontrollable.

I am dancing around the D word, but I don’t mean to be coy. When you cross into your sixties, your odds of dying—or of merely getting horribly sick on the way to dying—spike. Death is a sniper. It strikes people you love, people you like, people you know, it’s everywhere. You could be next. But then you turn out not to be. But then again you could be.

Meanwhile, your friends die, and you’re left not just bereft, not just grieving, not just guilty, but utterly helpless. There is nothing you can do. Everybody dies.

“What is the answer?” Gertrude Stein asked Alice B. Toklas as Stein was dying.

There was no reply.

“In that case, what is the question?” Stein asked.

Well, exactly.

Well, not quite exactly. Here are some questions I am constantly noodling over: Do you splurge or do you hoard? Do you live every day as if it’s your last, or do you save your money on the chance you’ll live twenty more years? Is life too short, or is it going to be too long? Do you work as hard as you can, or do you slow down to smell the roses? And where do carbohydrates fit into all this? Are we really going to have to spend our last years avoiding bread, especially now that bread in America is so unbelievably delicious? And what about chocolate? There’s a question for you, Gertrude Stein—what about chocolate?

My friend Judy died last year. She was the person I told everything to. She was my best friend, my extra sister, my true mother, sometimes even my daughter, she was all these things, and one day she called up to say, the weirdest thing has happened, there’s a lump on my tongue. Less than a year later, she was dead. She was sixty-six years old. She had no interest in dying, right to the end. She died horribly. And now she’s gone. I think of her every day, sometimes six or seven times a day. This is the weekend she and I usually went to the spring garden and antiques show in Bridgehampton together. The fire screen in the next room is something she spotted in a corner of that antiques show, and above the fireplace is a poster of a seagull that she gave me only two summers ago. It’s June now; this is the month one or the other of us would make corn-bread pudding, a ridiculous recipe we both loved that’s made with corn-bread mix and canned cream corn. She made hers with sour cream, and I made mine without. “Hi, hon,” she would say when she called. “Hi, doll.” “Hello, my darling.” I don’t think she ever called me, or anyone else she knew, by their actual name. I have her white cashmere shawl. I wore it for days after her death; I wrapped myself up in it; I even slept in it. But now I can’t bear to wear it because it feels as if that’s all there is left of my Judy. I want to talk to her. I want to have lunch with her. I want her to give me a book she just read and loved. She is my phantom limb, and I can’t believe I’m here without her.

A few months before they found the lump on her tongue, Judy and I went out to lunch to celebrate a friend’s birthday. It had been a difficult year: barely a week had passed without some terrible news about someone’s health. I said at lunch, What are we going to do about this? Shouldn’t we talk about this? This is what our lives have become. Death is everywhere. How do we deal with it? Our birthday friend said, oh, please, let’s not be morbid.

Yes. Let’s not be morbid.

Let’s not.

On the other hand, I meant to have a conversation with Judy about death. Before either of us was sick or dying. I meant to have one of those straightforward conversations where you discuss What You Want in the eventuality—well, I say “the eventuality,” but that’s one of the oddest things about this whole subject. Death doesn’t really feel eventual or inevitable. It still feels… avoidable somehow. But it’s not. We know in one part of our brains that we are all going to die, but on some level we don’t quite believe it.

But I meant to have that conversation with Judy, so that when the inevitable happened we would know what our intentions were, so that we could help each other die in whatever way we wanted to die. But of course, once they found the lump, there was no having the conversation. Living wills are much easier to draft when you are living instead of possibly dying; they’re the ultimate hypotheticals. And what difference would it have made if we’d had that conversation? Before you get sick, you have absolutely no idea of how you’re going to feel once you do. You can imagine you’ll be brave, but it’s just as possible you’ll be terrified. You can hope that you’ll find a way to accept death, but you could just as easily end up raging against it. You have no idea what your particular prognosis is going to be, or how you’ll react to it, or what options you’ll have. You have no clue whether you will ever even know the truth about your prognosis, because the real question is, What is the truth, and who is going to tell it to us, and are we even going to want to hear it?

My friend Henry died a few months ago. He was what we refer to as one of the lucky ones. He died at eighty-two, having lived a full, rich, and successful life. He had coped brilliantly with macular degeneration—for almost two years, most of his friends had no idea he couldn’t see—and then he wrote a book about going blind that will probably outlast all the rest of his accomplishments, which were considerable. He died of heart failure, peacefully, in his sleep, with his adoring family around him. The day before his death, he asked to be brought a large brown accordion folder he kept in his office. In it were love letters he had received when he was younger. He sent them back to the women who’d written them, wrote them all lovely notes, and destroyed the rest. What’s more, he left complete, detailed instructions for his funeral, including the music he wanted—all of this laid out explicitly in a file on his computer he called “Exit.”

I so admire Henry and the way he handled his death. It’s inspirational. And yet I can’t quite figure out how any of it applies. For one thing, I have managed to lose all my love letters. Not that there were that many. And if I ever found them and sent them back to the men who wrote them to me, I promise you they would be completely mystified. I haven’t heard from any of these men in years, and on the evidence, they all seem to have done an extremely good job of getting over me. As for instructions for my funeral, I suppose I could come up with a few. For example, if there’s a reception afterward, I know what sort of food I would like served: those little finger sandwiches from this place on Lexington Avenue called William Poll. And champagne would be nice. I love champagne. It’s so festive. But otherwise I don’t have a clue. I haven’t even figured out whether I want to be buried or cremated—largely because I’ve always worried that cremation in some way lowers your chances of being reincarnated. (If there is such a thing.) (Which I know there isn’t.) (And yet.)

“I don’t want to die,” Judy said.

“I believe in miracles,” she said.

“I love you,” she said.

“Can you believe this?” she said.

No, I can’t believe it. I still can’t believe it.

But let’s not be morbid.

Let’s put little smiley faces on our faces.

LOL.

Eat, drink, and be merry.

Seize the day.

Life goes on.

It could be worse.

And the ever popular “Consider the alternative.”

And meanwhile, here we are.

What is to be done?

I don’t know. I hope that’s clear. In a few minutes I will be through with writing this piece, and I will go back to life itself. Squirrels have made a hole in the roof, and we don’t quite know what to do about it. Soon it will rain; we should probably take the cushions inside. I need more bath oil. And that reminds me to say something about bath oil. I use this bath oil I happen to love. It’s called Dr. Hauschka’s lemon bath. It costs about twenty dollars a bottle, which is enough for about two weeks of baths if you follow the instructions. The instructions say one capful per bath. But a capful gets you nowhere. A capful is not enough. I have known this for a long time. But if the events of the last few years have taught me anything, it’s that I’m going to feel like an idiot if I die tomorrow and I skimped on bath oil today. So I use quite a lot of bath oil. More than you could ever imagine. After I take a bath, my bathtub is as dangerous as an oil slick. But thanks to the bath oil, I’m as smooth as silk. I am going out to buy more, right now. Goodbye.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Amanda Urban, Delia Ephron, Jerome Kass, David Remnick, Amy Gross, Shelley Wanger, and Bob Gottlieb.

I would also like to thank all the people who have labored hard to stop the forces of gravity where I’m concerned. As a result I look approximately one year younger than I am. You know who you are.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nora Ephron is the author of
Crazy Salad, Heartburn, Wallflower at the Orgy,
and
Scribble Scribble.
She has received Academy Award nominations for Best Original Screenplay for
When Harry Met Sally, Silkwood,
and
Sleepless in Seattle,
which she also directed. Her other credits include the films
Michael
and
Bewitched
and the play
Imaginary Friends.
She lives in New York City with her husband, writer Nicholas Pileggi.

ALSO BY NORA EPHRON

FICTION

Heartburn

ESSAYS

Nora Ephron Collected

Scribble Scribble

Crazy Salad

Wallflower at the Orgy

DRAMA

Imaginary Friends

SCREENPLAYS

Bewitched
(with Delia Ephron)

Hanging Up
(with Delia Ephron)

You’ve Got Mail
(with Delia Ephron)

Michael
(with Jim Quinlan, Pete Dexter, and Delia Ephron)

Mixed Nuts
(with Delia Ephron)

Sleepless in Seattle
(with David S. Ward and Jeff Arch)

This Is My Life
(with Delia Ephron)

My Blue Heaven

When Harry Met Sally

Cookie
(with Alice Arlen)

Heartburn

Silkwood
(with Alice Arlen)

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Some of the essays in this collection have previously appeared in the following:

“I Hate My Purse” in
Harper’s Bazaar;

“Moving On” and “Serial Monogamy” in
The New Yorker;

“The Lost Strudel,” “Me and Bill: The End of Love,” and

“Me and JFK: Now It Can Be Told” in
The New York Times;

“Where I Live” in
O, At Home;

“On Maintenance” and “On Rapture” in
O, The Magazine;
and

“Considering the Alternative” and “I Feel Bad About My Neck” in
Vogue
.

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ephron, Nora.