Sometimes I find myself thinking about the remembrance of Wendy Wasserstein, the playwright who sadly died way too soon, that Frank Rich wrote for the New York Times Magazine in 2006. She was apparently inscrutable to even her close friends, even more than the rest of us are to ours. An excerpt:

The Wendy Wasserstein who was always there for everybody (including me) at every crisis and celebration, the Wendy with that uproarious (yet musical) laugh and funny (yet never bitchy) dialogue for every fraught situation, the Wendy the whole world knew and adored was also an intensely private person who left many mysteries behind. Though she had countless circles of friends, the circles didn’t always overlap: her life was more compartmentalized than she let on. Though she had written a memorable memoir for The New Yorker about her personal and physiological journey to childbirth, the subject of her child’s paternity was strictly off-limits. Though it was apparent that she was ill for several years before her death, she hid the specifics and terminal gravity of her illness (lymphoma) until the endgame gave her away. By then she was out of reach of intimates who might have wanted to have a cognizant goodbye.

After her death, her closest friends were left to compare notes and clues about what had gone unsaid. But we had no answers. Roy Harris, the devoted stage manager for many of Wendy’s plays, including her last, Third, spoke for many of us when he published a tender reminiscence that also acknowledged his anger “that she hadn’t allowed any of her friends to be a part of her final months.”

As Roy wrote, dying was entirely Wendy’s “own business.” She was entitled to her decisions and her secrets. But the fact that she so successfully took so many of those secrets to the grave was a major revelation in itself. How could the most public artist in New York keep so much locked up? I don’t think I was the only friend who felt I had somehow failed to see Wendy whole. And who wondered if I had let her down in some profound way. I grieve as much for the Wendy I didn’t know as the Wendy I did.•