Ladyparts by Deborah Copaken

September 11, 2001 ©Deborah Copaken Author’s note:The following story is an excerpt from LADYPARTS, the book that spawned this Substack. It’s my own personal history of that horrific day. I figured it would be an appropriate moment to share this here, free for all to read, as a gift in honor of both the 5th anniversary of this publication and the 25th anniversary of 9/11.

Sometime in my late fifties, it started happening. Often. I’d meet someone at a party, or I’d speak to a friend my age, and the issue of hearing loss would inevitably pop up, whether that person knew about my own disability or not. “I know I probably need hearing aids, but ugh, just no, right?” they might say.

Soviet troops in Moscow, August 19, 1991 ©Deborah Copaken Most of you probably know me as that writer who is perhaps a little too monomaniacally focused on women’s health in midlife. (Yes, okay, guilty as charged.) But back in the day, between 1988 and 1992, I worked as war photographer. All of that work was published in the pre-Internet era, so most of it simply lives in a giant file cabinet in my office that I keep having to move from home to home.

Heart disease runs rampant in my family. Three of my grandparents died of heart disease, two of them young. (My fourth grandparent died of the ravages of old age, but eventually his heart, too, gave out.) My father, before dying young of pancreatic cancer, was diagnosed with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. My mother is currently managing atrial fibrillation.

A lion’s mane jellyfish on the Bethany Beach shore, 08/10/26 ©Deborah Copaken PSA for anyone thinking of swimming in the Atlantic Ocean this August: don’t. The sea, from New England all the way down south, has suddenly become plagued with all kinds of jellyfish this summer—thanks, climate change!—and their stings are no joke. First my partner got stung several times while swimming close to the shore in Bethany Beach, DE, presumably by smaller jellyfish.

Last weekend, I attended a wedding. The setting, overlooking Mt. Desert Narrows in Bar Harbor, Maine, was perfect. The weather was perfect. The bride looked stunning. The groom, divine. But my partner, who’d been asked to officiate—the groom is his godson—was faced with a painful conundrum: how to celebrate the joy of this special occasion while also acknowledging the concomitant grief of a gathering just one week after the death of the bride’s father?

Last weekend, I was hanging out with two women in their late fifties, each of whom has or had a parent living with dementia. “Do you worry about getting it, too?” I asked one of them. “Of course,” she said. “I think about it all the time.” “Well, just keep doing those thigh exercises, I guess,” I said. “What do you mean?” “You know, squats? Lunges?” My friend looked confused. What, she wondered, did squats and lunges have to do with cognitive health?

I started feeling the telltale signs Thursday night before the Fourth of July weekend: the urgency, the frequency, the pain. Ugh. Not this. Not here. Not now. After ten agonizing years of recurring UTIs, I hadn’t come down with one in quite some time, thanks to a steady cocktail of thrice-a-week vaginal estrogen cream in combination with a daily probiotic and a daily cranberry supplement specifically recommended by my urologist and personal savior, Dr. Alexa Meyer.

The “I want more time” tree ©Deborah Copaken I don’t normally notice or admire individual trees, but this one caught my eye. Perfectly round, symmetrical and lush, it stood solo on a diligently well-manicured lawn in front of a farmer’s modest house. What kind of tree was it? I had no idea. I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve never been good at knowing the names of trees.

If you grew up in the U.S. in the sixties and seventies, as both Christina Baker Kline and I did, your two pre-google options for random info and trivia, aside from the local library, consisted of the World Book Encyclopedia and the Guinness Book of World Records.