When FOF Bibi was a college freshman, she lost vision in one eye for a few days. The diagnosis was optic neuritis, an inflammation of Bibi’s optic nerve. Her vision returned, but the doctors said the episode could mean she’d eventually develop multiple sclerosis, which is inflammation and damage to nerves in the brain and spinal cord.
Bibi is an avid reader with wide-ranging interests, including modern American fiction and film and music criticism.
Bibi was fine for twenty years. She became a music teacher at a New York City private school, married Ted, a journalist, and had two children. (Coincidentally, Bibi was one of my son’s teachers and Ted worked for me as an editor, at the same time.)
Around the early 90s, Bibi could barely move in hot weather, but attributed her intense exhaustion to having young kids. “It also was hard for me to bounce back after my second child was born,” she told me. By now, you’ve undoubtedly guessed that Bibi was experiencing the initial symptoms of MS.
Within a few years, Bibi had to quit teaching because it became harder and harder for her to move. Today, Bibi’s left leg and arm are practically useless and she spends a great deal of time at home because she can no longer drive. “I go into weird contortions to get around in the house but use a wheelchair when we go out,” she explained. “I once asked Ted if I move like a drunk person, and he answered ‘drunk people move faster,” she remembered with a chuckle. The meds she was prescribed over the years were “horrible,” so she stopped using them.
“Ted has been amazing and my daughter has been an angel every single day of her life,” Bibi said. “Once, when she was a little tiny thing and I was having trouble maneuvering a snowed-in street, she piped up, ‘you can do it!’”
Bibi misses working and wishes she could at least volunteer to help older people. She’s grateful to friends who stop by and call, and talks about a former female student who visited often. “She’d call and say she was in my neighborhood and asked if she could come by for a chat,” Bibi related. “She actually lived 45 minutes away and was trying not to make me feel that she was going out of her way to see me.” The woman died in her forties of Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
When I asked Bibi if she resents what’s happened to her, she answered, “Compared to most of the world, I have it pretty great. Think about all the poverty. I can have a cup of coffee and biscotti.” I also asked what she likes to do when she’s alone during the day. “It’s all about surviving since it’s dangerous for me to move around and I worry about falling. But I love to read and listen to incredible music on You Tube, like Mozart, Bach and Schubert. Ted and I also love Dylan. I listen to music over and over and over.”
Bibi, you are an inspiration.
When Colby was six weeks old, I had to take a business trip to Hawaii (seriously), and Douglas wanted to join me. We were advised to have a will drawn up before we left. Although we didn’t have many worldly possessions (no house, car or diamond tiaras), we understood that we needed to name a guardian for our baby if something happened to us.
It’s thirty-one years later, and while I don’t need a guardian for my 31 and 29-year-old “kids,” I still need a will. The will explains how I want my possessions divided (right down the middle) and what happens if (God forbid) my kids and I perish together. Even without a will, Colby and Simone would automatically be entitled to inherit my estate (that word always sounds like someone is a Rockefeller or an Astor), because I’m divorced and they are my next of kin. But the will still makes the process easier.
I also have a living will, which explains that I don’t want to be kept alive by “artificial means or heroic measures…” if my medical condition is “hopeless, my deterioration irreversible or the maintenance of my life an overwhelming responsibility for my family.”
The reason I decided to blog about this right now is because I signed a new will and a living will today. My FOF lawyer, Ellyn Mittman, drafted a new will for me because the old version was outdated (you should review your will every five years or if your financial situation changes dramatically, she advised.)
Granted, this isn’t the cheeriest subject, but it’s an important subject. Besides, I don’t have to think about it again for quite a while. That, my dear FOF friends, is definitely cheery.
First anecdote
My entire handbag was stolen from practically under my nose about thirty years ago, while I was having lunch with my best friend, Linda, in a café in Bloomingdale’s. I had been heatedly debating with Linda on why she was still breastfeeding her two-year-old son and so I wasn’t paying attention to my bag, which I had placed on the floor next to me.
Second anecdote
The day Douglas and I moved to a new apartment, Linda (same friend as above) came to see it. She stood in the center of the living room and said: “It’s soooo small.”
Gads, we’re so judgmental when we’re young. Why did I care that her son was walking over to her breast for a drink? If she wanted to suckle him till he was 10, it wasn’t my business.
Why did she care that my apartment was small? She wasn’t moving in.
We surely don’t have to agree with everyone all the time. Debate can be healthy and educational, especially when it comes to subjects including politics, the economy, and the theory of evolution. Opposing opinions might even help us define ours. Isn’t that what jury deliberation is all about? But we needn’t impose our values and viewpoints on others when it comes to personal conduct that doesn’t interfere with our lives one bit.
That’s one of the beauties of being FOF. I’ve learned to be less judgmental, at least less obviously judgmental. Today, I’d still think my breastfeeding friend was nuts. I just wouldn’t tell her.
If FOF Nora Ephron is anything like her writing, she’s a hoot. Who can forget the famous scene in her movie, When Harry Met Sally, when the woman sitting in a diner booth near Meg Ryan says, “I’ll have what she’s having,’ after witnessing Meg’s theatrical orgasm.
Nora is clearly a woman’s woman. “I try to write parts for women that are as complicated and interesting as women actually are,” she’s said. Now she’s whipped up a new treat for us called I Remember Nothing, And Other Reflections, a collection of stories about failure, divorce and memory loss. Interviewed this morning on National Public Radio, Nora read from her book’s opening statement: “I’ve been forgetting things for years—at least since I was in my 30s. I know this because I wrote something about it at the time; I have proof. Of course I can’t remember exactly where I wrote about it or when, but I could probably hunt it up if I had to.”
Here are a couple of other titillating tidbits:
“I am never going to tweet. I’m just never going to.”
“You do get to a certain point in life where you have to realistically, I think, understand that the days are getting shorter, and you can’t put things off thinking you’ll get to them someday,” she says. “I you really want to do them, you’d better do them. There are simply too many people getting sick, and sooner or later you will. So I’m very much a believer in knowing what it is that you love doing so you can do a great deal about it.”