Henrietta Hay's Column

"Just think of all those women on the Titanic who said, 'No, thank you,' to dessert that night. And for what?"

Oh, how I wish I had said that first. And this one, "I'm trying very hard to understand this generation. They have adjusted the timetable for childbearing so that menopause and teaching a sixteen-year-old how to drive will occur in the same week."

Erma Bombeck won't be writing any more and we are all the poorer for it.

There was a time when I thought Erma was pretty corny. After all, she was writing about all that dull stuff like cooking and cleaning house. She was one of those domestic types that didn't even have the glamour of Betty Crocker. Anybody could write stuff like that.

Well, there speaks the voice of ignorance. When I started writing a weekly column I discovered very quickly that she was one of the most talented and perceptive writers of our day. Any woman who can make housework sound funny has more influence on women than Princess Di.

Practically all of us (and by "us" I mean the female 51% of the population) have spent most of our lives doing housework, which is, according to Erma, "a treadmill from futility to oblivion with stop-offs at tedium and counter productivity." But only Erma made it funny for over thirty years

Her columns sounded so smooth and simple. Surely, we say, she just knocks them off between the breakfast dishes and hauling the clothes out of the dryer. Not so. Unfortunately I never met her, so I cannot speak from personal knowledge, but I would bet my dishwasher that she slaved over every sentence - debated the choice of every word. If she produced a column with less than twelve drafts I would be surprised. I suspect that she wore out computers and bought paper by the gross. Her one-liners were produced with thought and sweat and probably tears on occasion. She could not bring us to tears without having shed them herself.

She had another talent, which is rare. She talked a lot about her husband and her children, but she never betrayed anything really personal - except her love for them. She only got serious when she talked about her three children whom she so obviously loved deeply. One of her most poignant columns included this gem. "Wouldn't it be wonderful if parents could look at their teen-agers and say, 'I want you to stay but you can't.'? Wouldn't it be wonderful if teen-agers could look at their parents and say, 'I don't want to leave but I must.' It's so much better to close the door gently on childhood than to slam it."

And talk about courage. She has taught us all. Erma had a mastectomy in 1992 and shortly thereafter developed a kidney disease, which required dialysis four times a day in her home. So did she toss her computer out the door and quit? She kept right on writing through it all. Some of her funniest stuff has come in the past few traumatic years. I can't begin to imagine how hard it was. In a recent two-day stretch I found that I need minor surgery on a finger (a typing finger), had most of a tooth fall off into a pancake on a Saturday morning and the garbage disposal quit disposing. Could I take a day off and feel sorry for myself? Certainly not. What would Erma say? Stick a piece of gum in your tooth and haul the garbage out in a bag, but if your luck holds you will probably trip and spill it.

She was a strong feminist and campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment, but she chided her sisters for "giving a war and not inviting the housewives."

Even with her illness she says she kept up with the housework. She had to keep her sources hot.

If Erma Bombeck was devout, she probably has the angels rolling in the clouds by now. At the very least she is showing them how to keep the place clean.

So long, Erma.