From 2005, ten years ago today:
My friend Nancy LaMott, the cabaret singer about whom I’ve written in this space and elsewhere, died ten years ago Tuesday. It wasn’t an anniversary I’d intended to spend in a hospital room, two months shy of my fiftieth birthday, waiting as patiently as I could to find out just how sick I was–but, then, life has a way of pitching curve balls at your head.
As I thought back over the past couple of months and remembered some of the things I’d been posting, it hit me for the first time that I must have decided somewhere in the deepest recesses of my mind that I was dying, and that I’d been spending the preceding days and weeks trying as best I could to come to terms with the seeming arrival of what Henry James called “the distinguished thing.” Why had I been so shy about calling a doctor? What made me respond so immediately and intensely to the Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd? Why did I quit listening to music for pleasure after hours? All at once I knew….
Read the whole thing here.