I remember doing a scene from The Heidi Chronicles during an acting class in college. I have no recollection of who my character was or what she said, but I do remember the play’s punch of old-school feminism jibing deeply with me. But I never really realized that Wendy Wasserstein was part of my consciousness. My first thought when I saw that she had died this morning was, “Oh, I’ll never get to meet her.” I didn’t know I wanted to.
And also, for my purposes, there’s the part of the obits (written in advance, apparently there was a Daily News report on her illness in December––erroneous, in seems; they said she had leukemia) that tell us she died of lymphoma. At Memorial Sloan Kettering. I scrambled all over the web to see what kind. What kind? What kind? Hodgkins, non-Hodgkins? Large cell? Mixed cell? Follicular? Straight up? Come on Google!
But why do I care? Why does it matter so much whether she had what I had? But of course that’s obvious. I’ll be inoculated, safe, if it was another kind. I’ll feel exposed to the chill wind of disease if it’s not.
Well, by tonight surely the AP will have picked up more details. For now, I’ll send her blessings. Because I can. Sometimes I feel guilty being touched by some people’s deaths and not others. Like, why aren’t you crying for the thousands dying in Darfur, or that little girl who was beaten to death by her dad, or Johnny Cash? But I guess we mourn who we mourn. And so because I am touched, however selfishly, I’ll send her wishes for a good beyond.
