Nora Ephron said good-bye.
Diagnosed years ago with an aggressive form of leukemia, she had to have known that her odds for a very long life had changed. She never went public with the diagnosis, but in her final book, "I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections," she seems to have faced the thought of mortality unvarnished and boots forward.
As I reread that book yesterday, the message all but jumped off the final pages. “What I Won’t Miss” was one list. “What I Will Miss” was the other.
Her publisher, Knopf, has given permission to reprint both.
How fitting that Ephron got the perfectly polished, straight-to-the-heart-of-it, say-it-like-no-one-else-can last word.
What I Won’t Miss
Dry skin
Bad dinners like the one we went to last night
Technology in general
My closet
Washing my hair
Bras
Funerals
Illness everywhere
Polls that show that 32 percent of the American people believe in creationism
Polls
Fox
The collapse of the dollar
Joe Lieberman
Clarence Thomas
Bar mitzvahs
Mammograms
Dead flowers
The sound of the vacuum cleaner
Bills
Emails. I know I already said it, but I want to emphasize it.
Small print
Panels on Women in Film
Taking off makeup every night.
What I Will Miss
My kids
Nick
Spring
Fall
Waffles
The concept of waffles
Bacon
A walk in the park
The idea of a walk in the park
Shakespeare in the Park
The bed
Reading in bed
Fireworks
Laughs
The view out the window
Twinkle lights
Butter
Dinner at home just the two of us
Dinner with friends
Dinner with friends in cities where none of us lives
Paris
Next year in Istanbul
Pride and Prejudice
The Christmas tree
Thanksgiving dinner
One for the table
The dogwood
Taking a bath
Coming over the bridge to Manhattan
Pie
Excerpted from "I Remember Nothing" by Nora Ephron. Copyright © 2011 by Nora Ephron. Excerpted by permission of Vintage, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.