The Times Magazine 55he first time I met Delia Ephron,
she had lost her husband to cancer.
Her older sister, Nora, the writer
and film director and her longtime
collaborator, had died of leukaemia
a few years before that. I said I was
sorry. “It’s OK,” she replied. “I’ve
actually just fallen in love.”
I asked about the new man,
but she felt it was too early to
say much more about it. She seemed rather
surprised herself.
“It does feel a little weird,” she said. “Life is
unexpected, that’s all I have to say.”
Writing up the piece afterwards, I said
I imagined we would soon read about this new
fellow, whoever he was. Delia made her name
by turning her life into prose. It is more or less
the family business. This lover of hers would
surely appear in the fullness of time, as a
character in an amusing essay that would then
be turned into a film starring Diane Keaton.
Well, that’s what I thought back in the
spring of 2017. In fact, the full story was
more like a thriller. Delia lost her sister to
leukaemia, then her husband to prostate
cancer. Then she fell in love. Then she got
leukaemia herself and nearly died. She begged
her doctors to let her go.
“All I wanted was out,” she says.
“I suddenly understood everything.
I understood suicide. I understood leaving
children, understood leaving your mates,
leaving...” She trails off. “You don’t want
anything but a black screen.”
And in the midst of this, the man she
had fallen in love with saved her life. It’s
a hell of a story.
“I’m lucky that I’m here to tell it,” she says.
We’re in her living room in the Greenwich
Village district of New York. The decor is
more or less as I remember it: cream walls,
a pale hardwood floor, a triangular glass coffee
table bearing the same snacks – nuts and a
little bowl of wrapped chocolate eggs. Delia
looks the same too, which feels like a miracle.
Just reading her latest book, I felt like I’d been
through something.
Her hair has grown back with the same
waves in it, and she’s dressed in a charcoal
shirt and slacks with a purple scarf. The awful
memories are “fading back”, she says. She
thinks this happened when she wrote them
all down.
The first of them was the death of Jerome
Kass, the screenwriter and her husband of
more than 30 years. For ten years he had
been living with terminal prostate cancer and
in the summer of 2015 his condition suddenly
deteriorated. She tried to prepare. “I felt,
almost in a primal way, the need to feel alive,”
she writes. “To walk fast on the street, get out,
engage with friends.”
At the same time she tried to plan theperfect end for him in the sunny bedroom of
their home on East 10th Street. (Her book is
called Left on Tenth Street because this was her
journey home from anywhere uptown if she
was going by cab – it’s a one-way street,
so you have to turn left onto it.)
“I mean, the idea that you have a fantasy
about how a death is going to be is ridiculous,”
she says. “I realise that now.”
She paid for nurses to come to the house
and help look after him, and his doctor issued
a “Do not resuscitate” order, which they
pinned to the fridge because, apparently, if
American paramedics come charging into
your home, they will look for it there. She was
told to call 911 if her husband had a fall so that
paramedics could help her get him back into
bed. The fridge notice would inform them not
to drag him off to hospital.
Well, he had a fall. She dialled 911. Five
emergency personnel arrived at her door and
went charging up the stairs, cross to find thatthey had taken the lift to the wrong floor.
“How can you yell at me when my husband
is on the floor?” she asked them. Then two
police officers arrived too. She showed them
all the forms. They told her he was now in the
jurisdiction of the New York Fire Department
and they would have to take him to a hospital.
She argued with them as her husband lay
on the floor. She got her doctor on the phone;
they refused to speak to him.
“And then finally, of course, I started
crying. I mean sobbing hysterically,” she says.
“And I really remember thinking, ‘Are you
doing this on purpose, or do you know that
this is the only move left?’ ”
Then, of course, the policemen, the
firefighters and the paramedics all got a lot
nicer. “They called up the fire department
doctor,” she says. “He was so sweet: ‘Of course!
Whatever you want,’ he said.”
She has since heard that this happens a lot.
“I don’t know if it’s for a legal reason,” she
says. “It could be. Everything that seems
unfortunate can be for a legal reason.”
The paramedics put Jerry back in his
bed and said, “Call us if you have another
problem.” The policemen shook her hand
as they left.
He died a few hours later, when she got
up to check on him. “I think he’s dead,” she
told the nurse. “As we both stared at Jerry,
he gasped,” she writes. “And that was it. He
was gone.”
In the weeks afterwards, she told everyone
the story about the paramedics storming into
her home and trying to take him away. She
was like the Ancient Mariner. “I told anyone
who would listen,” she says.
She felt like an alien in her home, on
her beloved 10th Street. “Everything was
different,” she says. There was “the sense of
feeling slightly lost and misplaced”, she says.
“Your home isn’t quite your home any more.”
People treat you differently too, apparently.
“It’s like they can see it on your face or
something,” she says. “You’re just the weakest
member of the pack.”
In groups she was ignored, she says.
Waiters started to ask her if she was sure
about her order. “That’s a lot of dairy,” one
told her, she says. “Nobody would ever have
said that to me before I was a widow.”
About five months after Jerry died, Ephron
tried to cancel his phone contract with Verizon,
the dominant American phone company. She
spent a long time trying to do this, waiting
on hold, getting disconnected. A friend of
hers “suggested that Jerry did not want me
disconnecting his phone, but honestly, that
doesn’t sound like Jerry”, she wrote in a piece
that was published that summer in The New
York Times. Verizon disconnected her phone,
but also disconnected the internet on her
other line. She wondered what she wouldT
The Ephron sisters (clockwise from left): Nora, Hallie,
Delia and Amy, around 1963Ephron with her first husband, the screenwriter
Jerome Kass, in the late NinetiesPReViOUs sPReaD: sHUtteRstOCK. tHis PaGe: COURtesy OF Delia ePHRON, PatRiCia Williams