Nora Ephron

When Nora Ephron died there was a huge reaction all across the creative horizon. TV personalities, news people, movie stars, writers. The reactions cut across all forms of entertainment and information sources.
I had heard the name but knew nothing about the woman, so I was blown away by the passion and enormity of the reaction to her death.
Somehow another one that passed beneath my radar.
I went online to read her biography and got the facts. She started out as a reporter for The New York Post. She went on to become one of the country's best known journalists, writing for Esquire, New York Times Magazine and New York Magazine. She published collections of her essays which were best sellers and also a novel called Heartburn, based on the breakup of her marriage.
From there she went on to writing screenplays for movies you might recognize: Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless In Seattle, You've Got Mail, Julie and Julia.
The woman was obviously tremendously talented and respected as such but it still didn't explain for me the intensity of grief her death caused.
Until I looked into what her peers and friends and admirers had to say about her.
First of all she kept her illness private. Only her family and closest friends knew that she had cancer so it was a shock to the rest of the world and you could see that in peoples' faces, hear it in their words. Although she left clues. She wrote her last book in 2010, I Remember Nothing, and it ended with a list of "What I Will Miss" and a thank you "to my doctors."
Mary Pols who reviews movies and books for Time, described her writing as feeling like "aged Lucinda Williams songs, the rawness sanded down, the comedy born of wisdom that softened the angst, but the voice still frank and strong."
She points out that Ephron's films were not artsy fartsy movies but they were movies that people absolutely love and watch over and over again.
Tom Hanks said that Nora made her world your world "she gave you books to read and took you to cafes you never heard of that became legends. She would give your kids small, goofy parts in movies with the caveat that they might not make the final cut but you'd get a tape of the scene. For a wrap gift she would send you a note saying something like "A man is going to come to your house to plant an orange tree and you will eat its fruit for the rest of your days."
There are many more testimonials out there but I am sure I am boring you already so I won't quote them.
What I got out of this is that Nora Ephron was amazing as a human being. She was intelligent, eccentric, cultured, talented, caring, sensitive and loving. Seems like everyone who knew her loved her.
What a special thing to be able to touch people in that way.
Of course all her books are now on my Amazon Wish List.
Nora loved spending summers at her home in Long Island, NY with her third husband and her kids, describing it like this: "We were always there for the end of June, my favorite time of the year, when the sun doesn't set until nine-thirty at night and you feel as if you will live forever."
According to Mary Pols "later she interpreted nature's messages differently, saw them as a reminder of the end of all things, and stopped spending her summers there."
Nora Ephron was a complex and a talented woman who managed to be loving as well.
She lived her life and shared it with her friends and family.
That, to me, is the ultimate definition of what it means to be human.