Nora Ephron Left Clues About Dying in Her Final Book

When Nora Ephron died of leukemia in June 2012 at the age of seventy-one, the tributes that poured in from writers, filmmakers, and readers reflected not just the scale of her achievement — When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, Silkwood, Heartburn, essays that defined a certain kind of smart, funny, clear-eyed cultural commentary — but the specific sense of loss that comes when someone who made you feel less alone is suddenly gone.

In the months following her death, readers who returned to her final book, I Remember Nothing, published in 2010, found that she had, with characteristic wit and indirection, been writing about dying without saying she was dying. The book is ostensibly about memory and aging — the things she remembered and the things she no longer could, the pleasures of her life and the inventory of what she would miss. Its final two lists — "What I Won't Miss" and "What I Will Miss" — read, in retrospect, as a quiet goodbye.

"Pie," she wrote on the will-miss list. "My kids. Nick. Spring. Fall. Waffles. The idea of Venice. Parties. Next."

The restraint of "the idea of Venice" is quintessential Ephron: funny, precise, honest about the gap between aspiration and reality, and more moving for all of those qualities than sentimentality would have been. She had kept her diagnosis private from almost everyone, continuing to work and host dinners and present the impression of ordinary life until very near the end.

Her friends said afterward that the secrecy was deliberate — she did not want to be treated as someone who was dying. She wanted to be treated as Nora Ephron, which is what she was until she wasn't.