There is so much in this story that is so very good. I wish I’d paid more attention to Ephron when she was alive, but, as is often the case, I tend to make my best literary discoveries after, sometimes well after, a really great writer has passed.
Ephron appears to be one of the ones I missed. But I won’t be missing her anymore.
When Max said, “Mom, I’m going to miss you so much,” she said: “Miss me? Well, I’m not dead yet.”
For most of the next three days, before she entered a coma and died, she was sort of herself, asking for the papers and doing the crossword. On Sunday, one of the nurses arrived to give her medication and innocently asked if she was planning on writing about what was happening to her. My mother simply said, “No.”
I took this more or less at face value until after her death, as plans moved forward with her play “Lucky Guy,” and it occurred to me that part of what she was trying to do by writing about someone else’s death was to understand her own.
Nora Ephron’s Final Act | Via NYTimes.com
And for the record, Jacob Bernstein, Nora Ephron’s son, appears to be one heck of a writer himself.