A few final words from the incomparable Linda Hirshman

The influential feminist and author left me a moving essay about her last days.

Linda Hirshman would have turned 80 this month.

But that birthday was not to be. She died in late October, her life memorialized in a major New York Times obituary with this headline: Linda Hirshman, who challenged stay-at-home mothers, dies at 79. The sub-headline, aptly, called her a “feminist provocateur.”

Linda’s cancer, once vanquished, had returned with a vengeance; and after many ups and downs, hopes raised and dashed, it became clear that this time it would be terminal. A last-ditch experimental treatment left her with painful neuropathy that dampened her passionate energy, the joie de vivre that was her trademark.

Linda loved opera, abhorred Rupert Murdoch, wore Chanel and The Row on her elegant frame, played classical piano, collected modern art, cooked expertly, and had a large circle of devoted family members and friends. (Among them were many much-younger writing women, including Rebecca Traister, Moira Donegan, Helaine Olen, Molly Jong-Fast and Irin Carmon.) She bristled with opinions. She lived large. She had a brilliant mind and the rare ability to warn about the future, like the prophetess Cassandra of Greek myth.

The author, labor lawyer, scholar and feminist provocateur Linda Hirshman

Given the circumstances of her illness, Linda, who liked to control whatever she could, decided to end her life — legally, thoughtfully and with medical assistance. Once she made that decision, she knew precisely when she would die.

And as that time approached, she did what she always did: She thought, and she wrote. Always with originality and wit; always with intelligence.

Linda and I had become close friends in recent years — neighbors on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, park walkers, museum buddies and even co-authors of a book proposal. She was a perceptive, supportive advisor on matters professional and personal.

Because of all this, she entrusted me with the final piece she wrote. I told her I would publish it here, and she approved.

So here it is. I wish you all could have known her. Luckily, you can still read her books.

Twenty-One Days

By Linda R. Hirshman

October 10. I have split peas. But I do not have a ham hock. And I’m damned if I’m going to eat vegetarian soup during my last three weeks on this earth. With Door Dash, the meat is only, I don’t know, $75.

Who cares? In 21 days I will be going to Vermont for medical aid in dying. A half cup of hemlock, their doctors assure me, and I’m off to a better world. This one got radically worse last January when I woke up from surgery to learn that I had a fatal, incurable cancer. Of course cancer doctors cannot decode the word “incurable,” so they tried one dose of something, and it triggered a side effect so ghastly that I’m pretty happy to get out regardless of the cancer. Someone else can spend three more months with their nerves unraveling from the cancer medicine, and, since it was useless, also with the final symptoms of cancer, and let me know how it was when they get to heaven. If this world were a little better, I would die in my own home in New York, but the state of New York wants me to live through the final stages of cancer, whether I choose to or not. So I must travel to a strange place and die in an AirBnB. 

Still, it’s pretty weird to know exactly when you’re going to die at all. Unless you’re on death row, and even then, there’s always the possibility of the Supreme Court reaching in. This really struck me this afternoon, when I realized I was out of ham. What to do with the last three weeks? 

Since the 1999 film, The Bucket List, that question seemed easy. Everybody should have a collection of experiences they put off all their lives, the movie plot suggested, wishes so intense that they broke out of the cancer ward to seize them before they died, or “kicked the bucket.” 

I sat in my beautiful, art-filled apartment in the middle of Manhattan, three weeks from death, and thought for a long time. Starting at age 14 with my first Letter to the Editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, I did pretty much everything I wanted to do. What a privileged, arrogant thing to say. Put another way, what a great report from the end of a long, productive, fortunate life. How did I get so lucky?

It was not exactly my doing. I was born in 1944, a year before Germany surrendered, and I am going to die a year before America may elect a crazy fascist to be President. I had little to do with the first, and like most of my liberal friends I am completely gobsmacked by the second. But in between those fascist book ends, and by sheer luck, I lived entirely in the Pax Americana, eighty years of peace and prosperity, my first and biggest break.  Unlike some in my generation, I do not mistake that foundational stroke of luck for my individual virtue. 

In 1957, I read a Washington political novel, “Advise and Consent,” and I decided that when I grew up, I would become a United States Senator. I had no idea at age thirteen that there were no women in the Senate, except the occasional term-filling widow. Ten years later, my government professor at Cornell, Andrew Hacker, handed everyone in his seminar a copy of “The Feminine Mystique” and the world turned for me again. I went to law school. For almost fifteen years after I graduated, I was a union-side labor lawyer, thumb in the dike for organized labor, giving them time to make an orderly retreat before the flood of the “Union Free Environment.” No such luck: the right-wing campaign against labor routed them almost completely, but by then I was cozied in to teaching law school. Like any ambitious academic, I wrote. 

And wrote and wrote and wrote. Law review articles like a proper legal academic and then a legal history, “Hard Bargains: The Politics of Sex.”  Applying my tough-minded analysis of the real politics of sex to the marriages of the next generation, I concluded that women shouldn’t quit their jobs and stay home with their children. “Get to Work …And Get a Life Before It’s Too Late,” earned me a website from the stay-at-home moms: Everybody Hates Linda. I wrote about a successful movement, the “Victory” of the “gay revolution,” which was my first cover of the New York Times Book Review. And so on. In February of 2022, a year before I got my death sentence, my latest book, “The Color of Abolition,” about a white printer, a black prophet and a little known society matron, got its review in the Times. I called my beloved older sister to tell her about it, as I headed for the local doughnut shop. “A two-doughnut review,” she pronounced after reading it quickly. I ate one in the car.

Three short months later, she was dying. A day before she died, she said, I’m going to miss you. Instantly, I answered, but I’m going to see you again when I die. This was deeply weird. I am a reform Jew. Indeed, I’ve never much believed in anything supernatural, including the god of reform Jews, whatever that is — Spinoza? I just go for the simple quiet of my modest little temple, with its liberal social agenda and music sung in a foreign language like going to the opera. But I’ll see you when I die is not a big part of Judaism at all, as I understand it, much less of reform! 

October 21. I guess I’m going to find out. Yesterday I found out that my plan to slip away, now only ten days off, was indeed well timed. The cancer has spread, thickening my blood and clotting my lungs. I should just get to Vermont in the nick of time. I sure would be glad to see my sister! I have a picture of her on my desk, dressed in black, holding a glass of white wine, and smiling her conspiratorial grin. As the time gets closer, my focus, always on this world, is drifting toward the next. If there is a next, my sister will be the first one I see. 

Since October 10, my caregiver had been hocking me to pick something, anything, to make my last days memorable. Sushi seemed like a perfect choice. After years of looking for cheap places (that is, something less than a mortgage payment), I could have a blowout omakase without regard to cost. I started researching fancy sushi restaurants near the Upper West Side. Shit, I said halfway through contemplating the relative virtues of unagi and yellow tail, did anyone on death row ever actually order sushi? What else do I love? I made a plan to go to the opera. They were presenting Dead Man Walking, which seemed appropriate. Anyway, I always said that if I had to die, I wanted to go in my seat at the Met. 

October 15. Although many people do die in the opera, I did not die in the opera. A few days later, the food critic at the Times published an article about the best places in New York for duck. Ah, New York, I wonder if there is New York in heaven. There was roast duck presented with a garland of flowers, Beijing duck in Flushing, Mexican duck, barbecued duck. Above all, there was duck two ways at the hot new bistro, Libertine, breast in green peppercorn sauce and leg confit underneath a bed of browned pureed potatoes. I had been, pun intended, dying to go to Libertine anyway, as they are famed for their rice pudding. By this time, at fourteen days, the only reservations on Resy were for long after my bedtime. I wrote them an email, explaining my plight. By return email, their majordomo, Chris, wrote back to tell me it would be their honor. He didn’t even ask for a screen shot of my diagnosis from Sloan Kettering, although I offered. (Don’t try this, foodies, I think it only works the legitimate first time.)

As the sands drain, a beautiful and amazing parade of people from the remotest corners of my life are asking to come and say good bye. As I planned, I should be able to get on the plane to Burlington, while I am still me, although a little short of breath. I want my friends and relatives to remember me, if they do, as still sentient and properly dressed. So I’m getting dressed and saying good bye. A palliative care doctor told me when you say goodbye you should say “I love you, I’m grateful, and I forgive you.” I’m down with the first two, but I have largely de-acquisitioned anyone who I had to dig deep and forgive. Day after day, people I love and am grateful for are coming by.

October 21. Yesterday, Sam, my second husband’s dead sister’s grandson came (with his girlfriend and everything on sale to eat at the new Wegman’s) to say goodbye. I had reconnected with him when he and I both moved to New York; everybody comes to Rick’s. He showed up at one of my book talks, and we’ve been pals ever since. When the new girlfriend appeared, even before he took her home to meet the parents, he brought her to the Upper West Side to meet his feminist, er, auntish thing. Now I had to set them off on their lives together without me. I will never be their wedding guest or a godmother. Realizing what a lively and inappropriately youthful life I had been leading until a brick fell off the building of life and landed on my head in January made me sad. 

October 23. This morning, with just one week left, I woke up to a notice from Resy that I had scored a table for me and my daughters at the hot farm to table place, Hen of the Wood, in Burlington for the night before my death. It won’t be delivered by a prison guard, but this condemned woman will definitely eat a good meal. 

October 24. I wondered why the doctor wanted to zoom with me, as I thought we had finished our work together. Turns out a bad blood test meant I’m cutting it kinda close. Okay, I thought as I purchased two more opera tickets for tonight.

* * *

As I conclude my final preparations, my caregiver noticed that I had accidentally gotten a gel manicure weeks ago when I was still ambulatory. So my mauve nails are apparently going to the grave with me. Note to self: Call the rabbi and see if it violates Jewish burial customs to have the plain white shroud and pine coffin enclose a set of purple fingernails.

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