I just finished Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. I'd read reviews of it, so I knew what it was about. And I knew Didion's name, though I'd never read anything by her before. She is a novelist, a screenplay writer, and a writer of magazine articles. I had her in my mind as a sophisticated author/personality who would have gone to parties with Truman Capote.
In actuality, it seems that she is a bit of a homebody, and had a very close relationship with her husband, John Gregory Dunne. Closer than most, because they collaborated on screenplays, and worked from home, each with an office, and a pattern to their days which involved a lot of time spent together, talking, swimming, eating, drinking...just being together.
Everything changed on December 30, 2003. First of all, they had just gone home from Beth Israel North, where their daughter and only child, Quintana Roo Dunne, was on a ventilator in the intensive care unit after a bout of the flu took over her whole system and put her in septic shock. Enough to stress the most stoic soul.
They were home, he was in his chair having a drink, while she made a fire, made a salad. He stopped speaking in mid-sentence and when she looked, he was slumped over. More than slumped over. He was dead.
It took her six months to begin writing her thoughts, but on reflection, admits that in some ways, she was insane the whole year after John's death. Her immediate reaction was to take control by calling 911, gathering credit cards and papers that would be needed, going to the hospital. Someone even referred to her as a "cool customer," though she was on autopilot the whole time, standing in line, trying to arrange a transfer to another hospital, anything to deny what was happening.
Later she tried to remember what she did, heard, thought. Over and over again, she wondered if she could have done something to change the events that led up to that day, the events of the day itself. She read piles of medical literature to try to understand what had happened to her husband and what was happening to her daughter. Like mantras, she remembered things that her husband had said, or she had heard about life and death, repeating it over and over in her head, and sharing with the reader the nuanced changes in meaning these phrases took, or the slight changes in context.
Her friends were there, yet she was alone. She gave his clothes away, yet kept a pair of his shoes, because he would need them when he came back.
It is a book about a close relationship between a man and a woman, and what happens when that bond is irrevocably, suddenly broken. It is the story of how she was a little insane in order to stay sane. It is also the story of how much one person can endure, as her daughter goes through her own trials. More happened after the year spanned by the book, which is included in a one-woman play of the same name, starring Vanessa Redgrave, which I hope to see when I next get to New York.
It is much more than a story of this period, it is a study of how we grieve and what grief does to us, what we do to survive.
I mentioned to a friend recently that I couldn't imagine going through what Didion had, and she looked at me and said "you did."
I guess she had a point. I didn't have a daughter undergoing a living nightmare when Red died, and we knew he was sick and declining. Didion and Dunne knew he had heart disease, he had had a stent placed years before ("they call it the widowmaker, pal") and had a pacemaker.
When Red died, he was in the hospital on a morphine drip for the intractable pain he was undergoing. We/I knew he wasn't going home that last time. Friends came to the hospital and left. Call us if there's anything we can do. Tacitly, call us when he has died, and we'll bring you home, or to our home. But when he died, I signed the papers that were put in front of me, walked to my car and drove home. It was three in the morning. I told my friends later that I hadn't wanted to bother them, but in truth, I thought I was fine, though I was as numb as if my blood had been replaced with novocaine. I stayed that way for a long time, too, in retrospect, going through motions, thinking I was okay. I read, watched movies, played computer games, rattled around the house. Thought about the past, especially when I went through old photographs to make a montage for a memorial reception I had at the house. I didn't actually have it...Friends did everything. It was just at my house.
And so, in a way, Didion speaks to me, and I can relate to what she says. There is no self-pity, only clarity of a sort.
From Delmore Schwartz, quoted in the book:
Time is the school in which we learn,/ Time is the fire in which we burn.
[Image from Didion's collection of photos, used in the New York Times]
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