Sister Mother Husband Dog: (Etc.) (3 page)

All my life that fear,
I will die, I will cease to exist
, has haunted me. That thing—when you’re dead, you don’t know it—really got me as a kid and stuck. And here it was, death, but not mine, Nora’s.

•  •  •  •

Nora and I wrote a pilot when she was in the hospital.

Before the debilitating effects of chemotherapy would kick in, there was an eight-day window (maybe nine, maybe seven, maybe ten, maybe twelve. Don’t expect factual accuracy here, I would flunk that test. Everything from that time is cloudy). Nora mentioned that she recently had had a meeting about a pilot for cable TV. An hour-long pilot is only forty pages, she said, we can write it in a weekend. Perhaps it was fifty pages, she
wasn’t sure, we’d have to check on that. Still, we could write it.

Of course, I said. What is it?

It was about an SEC officer (woman) and a CEO of an investment bank (man). Staggeringly rich, he’s corrupt in the way many/all bank CEOs in this world seem to be, imagining they’re not, doing tricky things we don’t know about, disdaining us for not understanding things they often don’t understand themselves. She (the SEC officer), a middle-class woman from Queens, gets assigned to his bank to police him.

Explain selling short to me again? I said, testing out my ability to wrap my brain around a Wall Street story. She did. I failed to grasp it, as usual. She was the one with the math brain. (Amy and Hallie have math brains, too, and if you want to know who has the best hands of the four of us, it’s me.) Anyway, I knew a bit about banks. I have a savings and a checking account. Nora mentioned Dodd-Frank (a federal law intended to police bank behavior). She could handle Dodd-Frank. One of the great things about collaboration is you don’t need to know everything yourself, you need to know everything between the two of you. Frankly I don’t think she had a clue about Dodd-Frank, either. But this was a pilot. We didn’t
need to understand Dodd-Frank until episode three. We weren’t thinking about episode three.

We were hoping only to get her through chemotherapy.

George and Martha
, as we called the pilot, was an alternate universe. A place for her to live.

We did write it in a weekend. Then we rewrote it. Sometimes I would arrive in the morning and find changes. She’d worked at night after I’d left.

We worked on her laptop at a circular table in the room, outlining first, the way we always did, jotting ideas for characters. Taking turns at the computer as we always did. We discussed lunch, something we always loved to do, but the choices were more limited—tuna sandwiches on whole wheat (not too much tuna—we didn’t like fat sandwiches) or ham and cheese on whole wheat from the deli two blocks away, or soup from Au Bon Pain in the lobby of the hospital.

We gave the script to the producer, Scott Rudin. He read it within a day or two. This promptness was unusual in my experience, especially since he had no idea that, as they say regarding movie plot gimmicks, there was a ticking clock.

We were going to have a notes meeting. This was all in the context of the secrecy of Nora’s illness. Like many
people, Rudin knew that Nora was in the hospital, but not that her situation was serious.

Dragging the chemotherapy drip to which she was tethered twenty-four hours a day (but was soon to be untethered from, making the meeting possible), Nora and I scouted the café on the fourth floor as a potential location. It was quite pretty—modern, blond wood. I think there was a waterfall. (Perhaps I’ve invented the waterfall. Waterfalls are soothing and peaceful—the hospital should install one if it isn’t there already.) This briefest of treks was almost jaunty. Not at all, of course, and yet . . . we’d scouted locations together before. Some joy of past adventures, a familiar fun way of being together, buoyed us the tiniest bit. (I wonder if I’ve imagined this in retrospect, this uptick in mood lasting maybe ten minutes. I’d hate to be romanticizing even a second of this awfulness.) In the end we did the notes meeting on the phone: Nora in bed, me in the chair, the cell phone on speaker lying on the sheet between us like another patient, an itty bitty one.

She got into a disagreement about the ending. She was weakened by this time, and the heart monitor started beeping, too. It was a madness. She dug in her heels—would Martha be assigned to the bank at the end of episode one? Nora would not agree to it . . . in her way, not
arguing, simply refusing to accede. They hit a bit of an impasse. I was thinking,
Who cares?
But of course you have to care, because if you don’t, it’s the end. Right? I guess. I don’t really know. If you were an actor playing Nora, arguing about something that inconsequential, that would be the subtext, you have to keep caring or you’re dead, that would layer it with meaning. Perhaps in life it was what it was: simply in character. Or a blessed minute of normalcy.

One day I was writing a scene, it was about four o’clock, which is when I always need a latte. I was at the computer. She was in bed. Truly, I was groggy with exhaustion. “I can’t write this scene, I’m too tired,” I said.

“Yes, you can,” she said.

I did. It wasn’t a bad scene. She liked it. “Oh, this is good.” I loved getting compliments from her. I loved it so much, I often didn’t show her things to free me of the need.

This collaboration was only a small part of what life was. This alternate universe. All of us caring for her were living in an alternate universe, as was she. The pilot made it a double alternate. An alternate alternate. Beyond beyond. Anyone who is in the hospital or trying to care for someone in a hospital knows how real life evaporates.

One day Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, was
going to testify before something like Congress—it would be on C-SPAN. “We should watch,” said Nora. But we didn’t.

That’s the last I remember of us and
George and Martha
. The cancer or the chemotherapy or a combination of both now had the upper hand.

I was scrolling through e-mails to find out when that was. How far from the end? E-mails might give me a hint because it was our habit to e-mail the script at the end of the day. If we were at her apartment, we e-mailed it to me, and vice versa. We had continued to do this, although less regularly, at the hospital. I was unable to pinpoint the date (my guess is about ten days before she died). Instead I found, from the end of January through April, a slew of e-mails about my living room couch. “My couch is dowdy,” I’d written her. She reassured me that I could probably fix it by getting it more stuffed. I had made a huge mistake, I wrote back, re-covering it in a hideous fabric—a mistake as bad as the pumpkin-colored Fiat I’d once purchased and a West End Avenue apartment (that was my worst mistake), all dramas she’d lived through. We had sat on the floor of that empty apartment trying to figure out if I really could live there. I couldn’t.

In spite of all our anxiety about her health during those months—frequent talks and updates on the
telephone—our sisterhood was continuing online at its most normal, with us sending pictures of possible replacement couches back and forth. At one point she e-mailed me from a couch store, urging me to hop in a taxi and come over, she thought she’d found one. I wrote her asking/bemoaning,
What’s wrong with
my living room?
After double-checking to make sure I wanted to hear, she dove in. She actually thought my couch was fine, but I needed new lamps, my chairs would be better off in the bedroom, and it was possible my coffee table was making too much of a statement. She offered to meet me at Mecox Gardens, a shop on Lexington Avenue, for lamps.

When I came upon all these couch exchanges, I remembered that one particularly, the one where she had dissected my living room, but I couldn’t find it. It was gone. It’s as if it deleted itself and all that is left are the sweetest—twenty in all.

•  •  •  •

I had learned Nora was sick six years earlier. I’d come home from Paris—my husband and I had been there for New Year’s Eve, and it had been the best New Year’s Eve
of my life. We’d rented an apartment, and many of our close friends were there, and we’d had a fantastic party. When I came home there was a message from Nora: “Are you back yet?”

She’d waited until I got home before bothering me with the news that she was not only sick, but the doctors thought she had six months to live. Jerry and I went up to her apartment. All I remember from that night was fear. It was in the room the way air was. We were all terrified. And that she showed me her hand. It was as white as marble.

I find myself often looking at my own hand, turning the palm up, taking some weird survivor relief that it is pinkish. Waiting for the day when it is not.

Nora was terminally ill. It was as if the Earth had shifted on its axis, something unfathomable had occurred in the galaxy in which I lived.

Sometime after knowing about her illness but before she was stabilized on treatment—when, I’m not exactly sure—I was walking down a Greenwich Village street thinking desperately, truly desperately,
I need something from her, I need something
. A few days later we were working at my apartment on our play,
Love, Loss, and What I Wore
. I was sitting at the computer, and she was
behind me and she said, “I have this ring that you should have. It’s a pansy ring, and you love pansies.” Which I do, they are my favorite flower (and one of Honey’s middle names). She took off the ring and gave it to me.

And the end of that story should be,
And I never took the ring off.
But I did, because that enamel pansy got caught on things, and several times it practically yanked my finger off. I often took the ring off, and one day I lost it. My guess is it fell off the bedside table and my dog ate it (and perhaps that is why she is eating her paw), but why would she? More likely the vacuum cleaner sucked it up.

I drove myself crazy trying to find it. I can’t bear that it’s gone.

•  •  •  •

I have been wondering whether Nora’s refusal to reveal her illness, her decision to keep it a secret, is something people will aspire to the way they followed her advice about egg white omelets. To those people, I want to say that she wasn’t always right. Five years ago, she told me to sell my Apple stock.

Not telling was the right choice because it was the one she wanted to make. It was her illness and her death, hers and nobody else’s. Whether you want to let others in
on your battle with a life-threatening disease isn’t how you want to die, it’s how you want to live.

I have been astonished that some people have criticized it, that they think they have any right to judge. Christopher Hitchens, the writer who chronicled his battle with cancer in article after article, chose to examine his illness minutely, letting everyone in on the pain, the medicine, the madness, and the endgame. Robin Roberts of ABC’s
Good Morning America
, who had a bone marrow transplant, took viewers along with her, inviting cameras into her hospital room, demystifying, erasing stigma, dramatically increasing the number of bone marrow donors. They are both heroes to me, as is my sister. There is no right way. We’re talking about death. It’s okay to be scared witless. I say that because it might be my way.

Secrets are tricky, no question about it. They can eat away at you, especially if they involve guilt or shame. Mostly no one can keep them. Ben Franklin said the only way three people can keep a secret is if two of them are dead. (Maybe Ben’s sister said that and Ben borrowed it.) Secret-keeping where illness is concerned requires an ability to mask. Not everyone can do that. Gossip is ugly when it’s mean-spirited or gleeful about someone else’s catastrophe. But sometimes gossip isn’t gossip, it’s only
sharing, a way to understand, make sense of life, lessen confusion, dissipate fear.

In the case of my sister, there were a host of considerations. Her movie career might have been compromised. Would actors commit? Would the studio allow it? You can direct if you are known to be sick, but you need another director to agree to finish the film just in case (which is what Robert Altman had arranged before he died). If you are famous and you are sick and you tell, you become a famous sick person. You can’t draw a line. If you’re out there with it, everyone, I mean
everyone
, knows it. And because they have read your books or seen your movies and loved or identified with them/you, people on the street feel familiar enough to offer comfort, confide their own traumas, pray for you (which is not something most atheists crave) when, despite good intentions, what they’re also doing is reminding you that you are sick. Also, Nora loved fun, and if friends knew she was sick, that might get in the way of it—in the way of their fun for sure, hers too depending on how well denial was working.

Telling is also a loss of control. Of power. The person with the secret is the person with the power. (Remember the roses.)

Nora told many people she loved them during the last months of her life, but without letting them know why
she suddenly went mushy. I think having people cry over her would have been too much. That’s just a guess.

(Again those roses.)

Many people, some whom I know, some curious strangers, ask me if we debated telling. And some writers have insinuated that she had an obligation to the living. They were poleaxed. How dare she?

If I had said to Nora, which I wouldn’t have because it was not the point and unfair besides, but if I had said, “So-and-so will be upset not to know,” I like to think she might have said, “I’ll be dead.” I like to think she’d say it because she always knew to call a spade a spade. Meaning
It’s not my problem
, but much more to the point,
I’m the one who is dying. I’m the one who is fucked. They have the luxury of being upset about it.
That doesn’t mean she didn’t love everyone. Of course her children did know, and a few others who were very close, but everyone else will survive.

When she entered the hospital we almost did release the information, but then changed our minds. In retrospect, it seems the right choice, because the news coverage would have overwhelmed/distressed her, all of us, and diverted energy and focus. But we didn’t expect her to die in five weeks. We hoped she would live—we all hoped she would live to see
Lucky Guy
on Broadway
starring Tom Hanks, and if she didn’t go into remission that she would limp along for a while, maybe go home and we would deal with the problem then.