Sandwiches and Champagne

Philip Pearle, a distinguished physicist,  who has survived being related to me since 1959 when he married my sister and has since become the best of friends, sent me an essay by Nora Ephron, who died in June at the age of 71.  He received it from a good friend of his, a recent widow, which gave the piece an extra poignancy.  In the essay that Phil sent me, Ephron faces her own death.  She wrote it when she was 64, perhaps before whatever it was that would kill her had arrived.

She wrote about a dying friend who returned to their authors the love letters he had received, each with a gracious note.  I wish I could do that but I don’t have any love letters to return.  In fact, I can’t remember ever receiving a single one.  (I don’t count the sweet notes my wife writes me on my birthday and on our anniversary.)  Ephron’s friend maintained what he called an “exit” file, which contained instructions to be carried out after his death, including the music to be played at his funeral.  She couldn’t think of anything she’d like at her own funeral reception beyond champagne and the nice sandwiches sold at a shop on Lexington Avenue.

Naturally I thought of my own memorial service.  I won’t have a funeral since I’ve asked that my body be donated to a medical school, but I imagine that my wife and children will want to organize a reception in which people will cross their fingers while telling each other what a great guy I was.  And they should be rewarded for their mendacity by, at the very least, sandwiches and champagne.  Good champagne, please.  You only die once.

But I am making light of her essay.  Although it’s written in an amusing way, her topic is a serious one, the inevitability of death and her feelings about it.  Her feelings were not even mixed.  Death was awful and aging presented no advantages whatsoever.  I agree that death is a bummer, to use slang that is probably out of date, but I see no point in raging against it.  I hope to put it off as long as possible, but the idea of living forever is horrible.  

I strongly disagree with her that age gives us no advantages.  Unlike Ephron who was most unhappy at the prospect of reaching 65, her next birthday at the time, I was delighted to reach 80.  The seats offered to me on the subway are the most minor of the pleasures of old age, which include the ability to strike up conversations with pretty young women, an excuse to avoid unpleasant tasks, and a longer view, a larger perspective, a calmness, not enjoyed when I was younger, that allows me to smell the lilacs (most roses have little scent). 

“Death is a sniper, she writes. “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. And 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. Nothing.  Everybody dies.”   That being the case, it behooves us to squeeze as much from each day as we can.  Come to think of it, perhaps I should sample some of that champagne right now.






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