Laugh Lines

For years, I have wished I could be Nora Ephron, or at least somebody like her.

When I heard the news of her death yesterday, none of that changed. Well, except that I prefer to be breathing. She was only seventy-one, and news of her illness and death came at me simultaneously, causing me to gasp for a moment, as if someone I had known well was suddenly gone.

People die all the time, and, for better or worse, they leave legacies. Famous people die as regularly as the rest of us do, their deaths, like their lives, touching more folks than can fit into your average funeral home. But, just like the rest of us, they leave behind only a handful -- at best a room full -- of people whose daily lives will be affected, who will continue to mourn beyond the initial gasp and feel as if a piece of themselves has been taken away.

The thing about writers -- particularly writers like Nora Ephron, who reveal so much about themselves in their work, fictional or otherwise -- is that they spend so much time with us, one on one time, when nobody else is around. They sit with us in our family room chairs, they help us pass the time in airports, they come to bed with us. And their voices, often, are the ones that linger in our heads as we drift off to sleep. It's not just that we get to think we know them; it's the power of their words, words so daring and jolting and shocking in their honesty that we begin to think the writer actually knows us, can see our innermost thoughts, our dirtiest little secrets.

I'd like to think Nora's death will have an impact on me greater than just a momentary gasp. Certainly not, by any means, the gaping hole her children and husband and other loved ones and friends will feel, but a sense of loss one feels when someone whose thoughts and insights touched and influenced many lives has been silenced. There will be a void until somebody picks up where she left off, feeling bad about her neck, inadvertently giving herself finger facelifts at the lunch table, laughing at herself for the hours she spends getting her hair dyed. We readers and movie goers will need somebody who can remind us, every once in a while, about the deep dark secrets that aren't really secret at all, about the orgasms every woman has faked, about the tantalizing romance of long distance e-mail.

I looked at my neck in the mirror this morning. There are worse things to feel bad about, to be sure, but my neck is certainly getting up there. I took my hands and pulled my cheeks back toward my ears, admiring my fantasy, low risk face lift. I looked over my shoulder to take a peek at my sagging butt. Okay, that did it. Aging can be funny, I suppose, but not before my morning coffee, not on an empty stomach, and certainly not before a dash of mascara and blush and a bit of clothing.

Maybe later today I'll pick up some of Nora's wonderful essays, let her remind me that there's humor in the sagging flesh on my upper and lower cheeks, that aging, though complicated, is the best alternative. And I will wait, and hope that some other writer will emerge to help guide me, laughing, through the stages ahead.