Delia Ephron - Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life

I knew my husband was dying in June. Hed been living with a terminal diagnosis for six years but suddenly his cancer turned aggressive.

The last time we saw the oncologist, he sent us home with a DNR (do not resuscitate) order and told me to put it on the refrigerator. Thats where they look, he said. He meant the EMTs.

I wanted Jerry to die at home. He wanted that too, but we didnt discuss it much. I was passionate about it, thought of it as a gift I could give him, to die in his own bed. The bedroom is sunny and the walls are painted a minty green. On days when he felt good enough, I figured, my husband, who was a writer too, could sit at his desk and write. If he needed to nap, which he did now almost all the time, he could nap on the couch where he always liked to nap.

We loved living on Tenth Street, a shady, pretty block in Greenwich Village. I couldnt bear to put him through his final exit somewhere else that was clearly only a place to die.

We redid our wills and updated our health-care proxies.

I began to rehearse being alone. Id go to coffee with a friend or to some event and on the way home, Id tell myself, Imagine you are coming home and Jerry isnt there. He isnt there to share, to listen, to rant, to laugh, to comfort.

Preparing for some unknown, for life without him, I also noticed that I needed to feel alive. I needed to walk fast on the street, get out, engage with friends. Dying was not where I wanted to be. I dont mean I didnt want to be with Jerry, but I felt, almost in a primal way, the need to feel alive. So there was a war going on insidethe need to be with Jerry, with his dying, and the need to be separate, an almost how-alive-can-I-feel.

I had met Jerry in my early thirties when I was finding my voice as a writer. My book How to Eat Like a Child came out the first year we were together. I remember hearing him in the next room laughing as he read it.

Jerry, a playwright and screenwriter, was in New York City doing the musical Ballroom, based on his television movie The Queen of the Stardust Ballroom. We fell for each other head-spinningly fast when a mutual friend brought him by my apartment. I felt Id been looking for Jerry my whole life and he felt the same. He had a cropped beard and great hair, golden brown. His brown eyes were soulful, and his voice was smooth, a beautiful tenor. Arguments and difficulties over the yearsthe kind that all relationships have in their own specific waysreally only deepened our bond. We knew that we belonged together and the fact that wed found each other was the luckiest thing.

Before Jerry, I wasnt someone who knew much about love. I was raised in Beverly Hills, the daughter of screenwriters. My parents were a team. They wrote films you might see now on Turner Classic Movies: Desk Set with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, Daddy Long Legs with Fred Astaire and Leslie Caron, No Business like Show Business, in which Marilyn Monroe sang, Were having a heat wave. Id been raised with expectationsall four sisters were expected to be writersbut my mother was cold to me and a drinker. She died in her fifties of cirrhosis. My dad was more loving but troubled and needy, a manic-depressive as well as a drinker.

Jerry was completely on my side. Id never experienced that. I hadnt believed it was possible. He truly loved me and nurtured my talent. He guided me as I tried to master variations of the impossible: first my humor books, then essays, then screenplays, then novels. I could never have found my way without him.

Writers are writers first. Before anything else. Its a calling. Jerry and I both knew that and honored that in each other. I was wildly attracted to him and loved talking to him. He had a phenomenal understanding of human nature. He observed things I didnt, and I observed things he didnt, and talking with him about what people did and why was endlessly interesting.

Now he wasnt going to be here to love me or to talk to me. To have conversations with me about everything. Stuff. What was on his mind. What happened on the street. Why something made him or me happy or drove one of us crazy. He wouldnt be here to hang out musing about nothing while eating chocolate chip cake. To discuss all my writing problems or all of his. What a character should do, what another might be feeling, where to go from here. Jerry knew drama, could write it and teach it. He taught me.

He was raised in the Bronx in a big, extended shtetl Jewish world full of aunts, uncles, cousins, and vulgarity. Lively, yet full of phenomenal ignorance. Jerry had musical gifts. At a very young age, he could play any tune by ear on the piano. He can play, why give him lessons? his parents said. His grandparents made gin in the bathtub. His father sold costume jewelry. The little money they had, they gambled. His dad broke Jerrys piggy bank and stole his pennies. There were very few books in their apartment. It was a great world to write about, and Jerry did, but there was no one at home to nourish a writers dreams.

Jerry was eccentric. We took tap-dancing lessons. Loved theater. Agreed on most things, liked to go to foreign places and do nothing much more than walk around and sit in cafs. Confiding in him was always comforting.

He was my true home. My first safe place.

At some point in September, Jerry was less able to walk around the corner, too dizzy to do the simple things like put Honeys bowl of water on the floor. Honey was our beloved little white Havanese dog. I talked to our internist and activated hospice care. We were assigned a social worker, a nurse, and a spiritual counselor. The only worship in our house was writing, but given that Jerry was dying and I was losing my soul mate of thirty-seven years, maybe one of us might want some spiritual help.