227 pages of dynamite
Exactly a month after my husband died I received my New York Times Sunday paper and found inside, in the magazine section, a lengthy piece by Joan Didion on the death of her husband. That this article, an excerpt from her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, should arrive in my home in a time where I was still so fuzzy-headed, so disassociated and raw, seemed a little uncanny. This article about the death of a partner written by one of my most beloved — and one of the world’s most effective and meaningful — writers, that this article would arrive for me, at that time, seemed, well, pointed.
I read the article and don’t remember being unravelled, but I did remember feeling that the forthcoming book would be something to put off, savour, wait for, use as a tool somehow. I got it for Christmas and it languished attractively in unread book piles. I wondered what it held. I wondered what inside me it could loosen. Eventually I decided it would make good summer beach reading. Notwithstanding I spent a great deal of time being happy at the beach with Jeff, the juxtaposition of delving head-on into someone else’s grief while I was still eerily surrounded by my own, and yet, ostensibly doing fine, seemed somehow appropriate. Doing fine, of course, is one of the strangest things of all about grief: you function. You do go on living. Not everybody, certainly, but so much of our responses to things are automatic, and physical, and mysterious. You survive when you have absolutely no interest in survival whatsoever. You do go on and things do continue all around you; time passes, people write books to get over things, new people come, others fade. None of it seems real or possible, but there’s a distinct point where biology takes over: you eat the dinner while you wait for the morticians to come, simply because the dinner is there and and so are you and no one can think of anything else that makes any more or less sense than heating up the macaroni anyway.