In the March 10th NYT magazine section, Jacob Bernstein wrote a very personal and warm tribute to his mother Nora Ephron. She died last June of acute myeloid leukemia. She had been diagnosed with the disease seven years earlier, but very few people, outside of her immediate family, even knew she was sick. Bernstein describes the ups and downs of his mother’s condition, even the fact that for almost two years the disease was being controlled by blood transfusions. Even though she wanted her condition to be kept a secret, clues were sprinkled throughout her writing. In “I Feel Bad About My Neck,” she wrote, “Death is a sniper. It strikes people you love, people you like, people your know, it’s everywhere.”
The last thing she was working on was a play “Lucky Guy” which will open on Broadway soon. The “lucky guy” in this case was Mike McAlary, a news reporter for “The Daily News” and the “The NY Post,” who won a Pulitzer Prize for his stories on Abner Louima. She did not know McAlary, but she knew his type. She too had once worked for “The NY Post” and so had a newspaper background. In 1998, McAlary died of colon cancer at the age of 41. When Eprhon began to work on the play again, she originally thought it was going to be a movie, she had been diagnosed with the disease. Shortly before his death McAlary is quoted as saying, “If you are a doctor or a lawyer, you take the case. If you’re a reporter you write the story. I didn’t think about being sick.” The same can be said of Nora Ephron. She was a writer and continued to write until her death. Bernstein says, “McAlary was a role model not so much in life, but in death, in the way that he used writing to maintain his sense of purpose and find release from his illness. Just like his mother.