is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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magical thinking.
When my father died in January, my friend Homay sent me Joan Didion's book The Year of Magical Thinking. I knew I wanted to read it but also knew that I did not want to read it right then. Now it's August and the book seemed, suddenly, readable. And o! what a book. It's not a book about grief in any straightforward sense: it won't tell you how to deal with loss and it probably won't make you cry (very often). But it is the most peculiar and courageous performance of a work of grieving I've ever encountered (and you might say I've read pretty widely into this genre, lately for obvious reasons, but also even before that, because some of my work is about how experiences of loss affect the work of political and legal institutions). In the book Didion mercilessly examines her own experience of losing her husband to a sudden heart attack while her only child is in the hospital near death.
But it isn't only a book about death. Instead it successfully captures what is singular (and common) about every romantic relationship: we all love other people, argue with them, support them, undermine them, use and abuse our intimacies--we all do this, but we all do it in our own ways. Singular and common. So the book pays homage in an unsentimental way to what was a deep and (for its participants) important love relationship, and it does so without covering over the areas of conflict that always form part of such a pairing--and that in itself is remarkable. The book is as much about what is gorgeous, rare and complicated about real relationships as it is about how disorienting it is to find oneself no longer in the midst of one because of death.
In the book Didion also uncovers, almost in the mode of a detective fiction, her own inability to process the simple fact of what has happened to her. Hence the title: magical thinking. She painstakingly draws out for us delusional hopes that drove her to make irrational decisions she could, at the time, describe to herself as rational. She couldn't get rid of all of John's shoes because (unexamined reason) what if he came back and needed them? If she avoided every landmark and topic that reminded her of husband and daughter she would be fine. And so on.
In doing so she makes clear how thin a line can divide rational from irrational regret. Rational regrets she explores include realizing too late the many times her husband tried to tell her something important that she simply refused to hear: that he wanted to their lives to be less routine, that he knew he was nearing death, or that he was doubting what contribution his writing made to the part of the world that lasts longer than a life. She heard him say these things but she refused to take them seriously and therefore never had a meaningful conversation with him about them. Rational regret. But she also regrets not doing all sorts of things that she "could have done" to stop John from dying or her daughter Quintana from ending up near death in a hospital. They could have gone out to dinner rather than cooking at home. She could have insisted they move to Hawai'i instead of New York. And so on with lots of things large and small, ways the brain tries to insulate itself from the trauma of loss.
I called the book merciless, but it is also comforting--because it is merciless. There's no hiding. If you've lost someone important, and you've felt exposed by it, if you've found yourself acting crazy, thinking ridiculous things, unable to predict or control what you'll say to other people, if you've ever loved or relied on someone, or felt overwhelmed by the demands of that love or the loss of it, then you'll likely recognize yourself in some parts of Didion's story. And it will be comforting not because it tells you what you (or what a larger world less troubled by grief) wants to hear, but because it sets out to tell one person's truth without ever trying to make anyone comfortable.
Most of the book is not directly about grief. But there is this one really startling paragraph towards the end of the book, and I'll just transcribe it here for you because there is no doing it justice in other words:
"Grief turns out to be a place none of us knows until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes. In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be 'healing.' A certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days. We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place. When we anticipate the funeral we wonder about failing to 'get through it,' rise to the occasion, exhibit the 'strength' that invariably gets mentioned as the correct response to death. We anticipate needing to steel ourselves for the moment: will I be able to greet people, will I be able to leave the scene, will I be able even to get dressed that day? We have no way of knowing that this will not be the issue. We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself."
Reading the book, that's probably when you'll cry. But let's, if we can, try to end on an upnote. Didion describes the best birthday gift John ever gave her, 25 nights before he died. He simply read to her a passage from one of her own novels and then looked at her and said, "God damn. Don't ever again tell me you can't write."
5:16 p.m. - August 26, 2012
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