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.
By the time I picked up The Year of Magical Thinking I was ready to feel a lot of things that had, for reasons of biological survival or whatever else, grown more distant from me in the passing months. Despite the general sense of "getting on", I was dogged more and more by those shadowy things, the gossamer tricks of mind on which Didion poised the theme of her book. I knew full well what happened to me, and to Jeff, and yet the more time went on, the less it made any sense. For Didion, "magical thinking" moved somewhere between denial and fantasy; for me it was more about confusion. How can I even be sure something that was so vibrant in the past even existed? It wasn't that I was trying to convince myself he was still alive — it just didn't make any sense that he could have both been alive and be now dead. You mean things just disappear?
But from where exactly did Dr. Volkan and his team in Charlottesville derive their unique understanding of 'the psychodynamics involved in the patient's need to keep the lost one alive,' their special ability to 'explain and interpret the relationship between the patient and the one who died'? Were you watching Temko with me and 'the lost one' in Brentwood Park, did you go to dinner with us at Morton's? Were you with me and 'the one who died' at Punchbowl in Honolulu four months before it happened? Did you gather up plumeria blossoms with us and drop them on the gates of the unknown dead from Pearl Harbor? Did you catch cold with us in the rain at the Jardin du Ranelagh in Paris a month before it happened? Did you skip the Monets with us and go to lunch at Conti? Were you there with us when we left Conti and bought the thermometer, were you sitting on our bed at the Bristol when neither of us could figure how to convert the thermometer's centigrade reading into Fahrenheit?
Were you there?
No.
You might not have been useful with the thermometer but you were not there.
I don't need to 'review the circumstances of the death.' I was there. (p.56)
For me this excerpt hits at the very crux of it: It's when the time that the person was alive begins to feel less real to you than the time when they are not there any more that things go a little sideways, particularly if it's someone you've mixed up your identity with, like a partner. And the talking about it, the writing about it, the reading about it, the trying to figure it out in words or art or psychotherapy or forcing yourself to remember are all parts of keeping that person alive and keeping the continuity between the then (which doesn't make sense) and the now (which doesn't make sense either, but involves at the very least getting up every day and eating the yogurt and puttering about in whatever ways you can deem meaningful at the time because you simply just do). I don't know if Didion felt the same incredulity at the sun rising each day as I did, but the weird thing is you get used to it.
It turned out that reading The Year of Magical Thinking was a little bit like hitting myself in the face with a two-by-four every day—and yet, of course, I couldn't put it down. I forget where I started on Didion: whether with The White Album or Slouching Towards Bethlehem, but both were perfect, hitting on all that I love about nonfiction, somehow filling not just pages but landscapes with spare but emotionally luminescent prose. Her ability to evoke emotion has been so strong at times as to almost pull me out of relationships. I had saved this book like I was saving a special bar of chocolate. I expected it to take me somewhere understanding, to elicit things I feel sadly distant from. Well, let's be honest. I was hoping it would be a part of closure.
But the book itself feels slight and unfinished. Knowing the dimensions that lie beyond it, of course, makes it feel more fragmentary—Didion's daughter Quintana, whose prolonged illnesses the book also weaves around, died after the book was completed (and four days after Jeff did, actually). Though it's not the unfinished story of grief for Quintana that leaves me wanting, it's the sense that grieving is in many ways never done. Not in a "never wear colors or feel love again" way, but in the way that grief is also celebration, that memory is crazy but necessary, that the things that are too much for us are also what we may need the most to ground, renew, and make things seem real. And because of that it seems hard to snap the book shut and say, "Oh, well then, that's sorted out!"—for Didion or for myself or for the countless people beginning these same journeys themselves every day. From where I sit anyway, the collective confusion of grief is palpable: that slow uphill climb of absence, confusion, sadness and—I'm going to say the word no one admits to—relief that can come in the watershed of fear, sorrow, and loss.
Like they say about anything else, it's a process.
