My autographed You've Got Mail poster from the raffle at Housing Works' "We've Got Mail" event in February.

It's taken me more hours than I'd like to pay proper tribute to you after your passing, but here is my attempt now: a letter to heaven, and I hope it finds you well. You may wonder why write this to a woman I never knew, but as Chris Matthews put it the other night: "Because this is about us."

Your writing was more than words on a page, on a screen. You were a storyteller in every sense of the word: it's because of you that I know that complicated matters of the heart can indeed be put into words, and that none of us are ever alone in loving, losing, or learning to begin again.

I was only a child the first time I saw one of your films. I have loved them ever since. There was something different about the heroine of your stories--the way she laughed, the way she spoke (so eloquent, so real), the way she rolled her eyes and brushed the hair from her face. I so wanted to be Kathleen Kelly (part of me still does today) because even though she lost at some things, she won too, and isn't that the message we all need? You can fall and you can fail--in fact, you will fall and fail a lot--in love, in work, in friendships, in life...but pick yourself up. See, I've had falling outs with friends, and I've made mistakes for 23 years, and I fell for the wrong person once who's since broken my heart every day for two years now...but it'll all pass. I believe it.

Yes, let yourself grieve, and feel every emotion of the pain of what you had and what could have been, but you'll be okay. And, please, don't be afraid to start over.

The themes of your films strike a timeless chord, and even though future generations will never know that familiar dial-up sound, there's still something about the characters and their journey that captivates hearts and souls. "I always recognized in those stories pieces of people I knew and conversations I had had," Linda Holmes wrote on NPR after learning of your passing. "They were like choral compositions where everything else is just pretty sounds, but you can pick out the alto line because you sang it in choir fifteen years ago. You could never reproduce the entire thing without amplification and help, but that one part makes sense."

Sleepless in Seattle taught me something about loneliness as much as When Harry Met Sally taught me about growth. The way I write, the way I speak, the way I think has been subtly influenced by your writing, and you share the credit (and, let's be honest, the blame)--along with Didion and Plath--for the messy and emotional basket case I can be, and the messy and emotional words that have led to these blogs.

From your films to your essays, and your forays into topics of friendships, romance, feminism, aging, and more, the pages of the book you created truly never tired. Charles McGrath's obit in the Times for you ended with a bit of your writing that brought forth the simplicity of why people--why I--adored you:

Ms. Ephron’s collection “I Remember Nothing” concludes with two lists, one of things she says she won’t miss and one of things she will. Among the “won’t miss” items are dry skin, Clarence Thomas, the sound of the vacuum cleaner, and panels on “Women in Film.”

The other list, of the things she will miss, begins with “my kids” and “Nick” and ends this way:

“Taking a bath
Coming over the bridge to Manhattan
Pie.”
You saw New York differently than so many, I'm sure of it. You saw life so differently too--not that you lived it differently, but that you knew how to express it differently, and more authentically than most.

Nora...it was nice to have met you.

Ciao,
Traci

I received an email from a good friend earlier today with a very sweet response to a bit of my ranting, with three words I think we're all familiar with: "You deserve better."

I think we've all said that to someone at some point, or heard it from someone ourselves. You deserve better, and you and you and you--so, in theory, we all deserve better. And yet, we all don't think so either. We're always selling ourselves short, letting others walk all over us in hopes that we can be the bigger person. But sometimes, people just treat others like crap. We all do it, whether it's intentional or not.

Perhaps we should all be striving for the patience and kindness we hope for others to bestow on us so it doesn't matter when we're placed on back burners or ignored, and it doesn't matter when someone makes a promise and forgets. If you put enough good out there in the world, some of it is bound to come back to you someday, right? At least we should all try to live a life that encourages compassion.

There will be people who you choose to invest in who will never take you seriously, never see you as an equal. They will forget the things you say, they will ignore you and choose others they may not really care about because you may demand too much: you may demand respect, and we don't like to be told we haven't been respecting others. They will mistreat you, and you will have a choice to stand up for yourself or not. Most often, we choose to sit back because we want to believe that that person we love cannot be that cruel. At least that's what I want to believe. I want to believe people are inherently good, and if that makes me naive, then so be it--I'm a fool.

The world itself is filled with so many things that make me lose faith in the decency of others. I spend my entire day watching the news and there's a lot of shit out there that is enough to incite utter chaos and despair in my brain on the subway ride home. So I don't like to feel like the people I come in direct contact with from day to day are indecent or disrespectful as well. I don't want to be someone who isn't a decent friend or a decent human being either.

I suppose this is just a very verbose answer to the question, "Why do you let yourself be treated like crap?" And the short answer could well be, "I'm not good enough for him/her/them/etc." Really, my answer is that, deep down, I'm sickeningly optimistic.

"'You have your wonderful memories,' people said later, as if memories were solace. Memories are not. Memories are by definition of times past, things gone. Memories are the Westlake uniforms in the closet, the faded and cracked photographs, the invitations to the weddings of the people who are no longer married, the mass cards from the funerals of the people whose faces you no longer remember. Memories are what you no longer want to remember.”

I just finished reading Joan Didion's Blue Nights, her "follow up" (if you will) to The Year of Magical Thinking. Friends and readers, you'll remember the first time I read The Year of Magical Thinking: it was the summer of 2010 and I was tiptoeing around the pieces of a broken heart. I felt silly for feeling "better" after reading the book because its subject is so painful. The loss of a husband and daughter almost back-to-back is nothing compared to a heartache; it's a different sort of heartache, really.

When Mengfei lent me The Year of Magical Thinking, she prefaced it with, "This helped me get over the death of my guinea pig." I laughed, but after reading it, I got it. Any loss--no matter how big or small--is still life-changing to various degrees. We lose a pet, and our lives are quieter. We lose a person, and our lives feel smaller. We feel smaller.

“Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.”

It has been one year since I graduated college and parted ways from some of the most important people in my life. It's been five months since I moved to New York, away from the semblance of stability and community in DC. It feels like a slow growth, but a growth nonetheless, and I'm thankful for the place I'm at now, though there's an absence of "something more."

I hate to be morbid, but as I was reading Blue Nights, the same thought ran continuously through my head: this reads like Didion's farewell to the world. Didion's work has always contained an anxious feeling that death is soon to come, but there was something about Blue Nights that felt so finished, so final. And, in connecting the dots, I have to wonder if this heartbreak has finally come to an end--the heartbreak of living, of loving, of losing.

We can choose unhappiness every step of the way of our lives. We can choose to let the big or the little things break us. In the face of adversity and pain, we can choose to give in. Or, as Didion shows us, we can learn to live, and I do believe that every day is a struggle to learn to live.

But I also believe that nothing is never too impossible to learn to live through. Nothing is too much to ever stop us from truly living. You can go through your whole life putting off the inevitable to avoid pain and loss. Or you can choose to embrace it. I choose to embrace it.