On finding out what has actually happened - Matthew Shaer in NYT:

‘Her hopes were not entirely misplaced: Segal had a long history of rebounding from catastrophe. In her 80s, she underwent open-heart surgery to address a misbehaving valve; in her 90s, she had a pacemaker installed. Her left hip had been replaced; during the pandemic, she was hospitalized with what turned out to be a case of pneumonia. And a few months earlier, she lost vision in her right eye. Miraculously, none of the incidents seemed to slow her down. “She was still able to get out, albeit with a walker,” her publisher, Dennis Johnson, told me. “She still had the charm and the wit.” She still wrote too — writing being her way, as she put it to me, of “being understood and understanding myself. I consider it the most amazing thing one can do with one’s life: to find out what has actually happened.”’

(…)

‘The passage is quintessentially Segal: the beauty and plain truth of the metaphor, punctuated by a joke at her own adolescent expense, as if to ward off the goop of sentimentality.’

(…)

‘I recently asked Segal if she and her mother ever discussed the Holocaust, considering the momentous role it played in the lives of her family members, many of whom died in concentration camps. “No,” she said. “Not really. What would we have said? We both knew.” “Knew what?” I prodded.
“That it was unspeakable,” Segal said.’

(…)

‘When I asked Segal this summer if the constant revising was a matter of accuracy, she disputed the premise of my question. “Accuracy is something else entirely,” she said. “I don’t ever know if I’m being accurate. I just know I want the word that says, ‘OK, this is what I mean.’” For the same reason, she explained, she had grown to despise the euphemistic language of old age, which is notably absent from the Ladies’ Lunch stories. “You get to a point where people start to talk to you about being elderly, about being a ‘senior citizen,’” she said. “Listen to me: I disavow it! I refuse to use the words. I refuse to be ‘elderly.’ I refuse to talk about ‘passing away.’ Where am I passing? Can you tell me? No. The point of writing, I believe, is finding the right words. And being old is being old. Dying is dying. You must not be scared to say it.”’

(…)

‘Segal took my hand. “I don’t think I know how to do hospice,” she admitted suddenly. “Nobody knows how to live; nobody knows how to die. But we all figure it out, don’t we?” She looked out the window, over the adjacent rooftops, south toward Midtown. “I’ve been wondering,” she said, “whether going on hospice is something that I want to write about. I haven’t decided whether it’s somehow. …” she trailed off. “I’m not sure it’s fair.” “Why?” “When I figure out the why, I will either do it or not do it,” she smiled.
“But you’ve written your way through your whole life,” I said.
“You may be right about that, but to write well, you need the clarity that comes with time, and I don’t have more time. Maybe this conversation will give me the clarity,” she went on.’

Read the article here.

Dying is dying.

I visited Lore at the end of July. She told me that she had not find the right words to describe the process of dying. She was afraid she would make it too funny. Then she chuckled.