By Joan Didion
Alfred A Knopf, New York
227 pages
Life changes fast. Life changes in an instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." So Joan Didion first wrote of the sudden and untimely death of her husband and partner of 40 years, the writer, John Gregory Dunne. Didion is the author of five novels and eight books of non-fiction. At various points in a long and distinguished career, she has been a journalist, a playwright, an essayist and a novelist. In the widely acclaimed book The Year of Magical Thinking, which won the National Book Award, Didion grapples with the loss of a loved one and life as she knew it. As she takes the reader frame by frame into the stages of grieving, she holds up a portrait of a happy marriage and home life, a rewarding professional collaboration she shared with her husband for nearly half a century. In a larger sense, this is one woman’s account of intense personal loss and how to find life anew.
First there was the need to make sense of the turn of events. The year 2003 ended on the worst possible note for Didion. Just days before Christmas, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne’s only daughter, Quintana, contracted a flu which turned into pneumonia then a complete septic shock. Soon after she was put in an induced coma and placed on life support. The night before New Year’s Eve after Didion and Dunne returned home from visiting their daughter, John Gregory Dunne slumped to the floor while having a drink and suffered from a massive and fatal coronary. A month after her father died, Quintana appeared to have recovered from her illness. Yet two months later, upon arriving at the Los Angeles airport, she collapsed and was taken to the UCLA Medical Center where she underwent six hours of surgery to treat a massive hematoma. Quintana subsequently died between the time Didion was completing the book and its publication.
In The Year of Magical Thinking Didion employs memory, literature, medical journals, rules of etiquette, psychological, anthropological and geological studies, as well as reflections on tragic historic events in trying to come to terms with her husband’s death. All of it leads her to this conclusion: "I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let them be the photograph on the table. Let them be the name on the trust account. Let go of them in the water. Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of him in the water." Remembering the times she swam with her husband into the cave of the Portuguese bend near their home at the Palos Verdes Peninsula – timing the moment when the tide was right – she writes, " You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change." So her husband once said to her. But there are so few right moments.
"Life changes in the instant – the ordinary instant," writes Didion. It is a line repeated like a mantra in the book. Here she draws reference to the 9/11 Commission report describing the day of September 11,2001 as it "dawned temperate and near cloudless in the eastern United States." No telltale signs that bright skies could possibly give way to another day that would live in infamy. When she interviewed people living in Honolulu at the time Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941, most of them told her it began as an "ordinary Sunday morning." Tragedy and grief seldom come announced. Yet it allows one time to take stock of things as Didion had done – using every means at her disposal to come to grips with the unthinkable. Why is the passing of a loved one unthinkable if it is indeed inevitable? In "Death, Grief and Mourning" by English social anthropologist, Geoffrey Gorer, he describes the rejection of public mourning as the result of the a new "ethical duty to enjoy oneself" and as well the "imperative to do nothing that might diminish the enjoyment of others." Didion discovers that both in England and the United States, contemporary norms dictate that grief must be born quietly by the bereaved. Those who bore their sorrow stoically and courageously had the respect and admiration of society at large. In such societies public displays of grief are generally not well tolerated. Somehow it suggests a lack of control that people have over things that happen in their lives.
How many times had Didion assured her daughter in the height of illness that everything would turn out all right – at the hospital in New York, before leaving for Los Angeles, when it seemed that her daughter had recovered – then circumstances intervened, each in turn bringing a ray of hope or piercing her heart with renewed fear. "Time is the school in which we learn," so Didion tells herself. She learns that we have less control than we would like to believe over the course of our lives and much less over the lives of the people we love most. After our best efforts are done all we can do is let go.
Coming to terms with her loss and grief Didion went through several phases. First came the obsession with understanding how could it all have happened so unexpectedly. Next came the stage of dealing with grief – thus her references to various sources from literature to medical journals, passages of scripture and the immutable laws of nature. In a writer’s world, after all, information is control. Almost from the beginning there was the hope that her husband would somehow return. Along the way there were waves of memories triggered by places, people, events or unsuspecting encounters. "The vortex effect" as Didion calls it was brought on by any encounter whether planned or unplanned that opened up a flood of memories. These were moments of great clarity gained from the benefit of hindsight and by one who is determined to seek her truths.
"Survivors look back and see omens and messages they missed. They live by symbols,"writes Didion. The stages of grief proved to be transcendent moments for Didion and one that she brings across in this book vividly and passionately. That is perhaps a small comfort for someone who must cope with a monumental loss. Didion’s story resonates because it speaks of the fragility of life, the impermanence of everything and what we take for granted. Invariably, we will be confronted with our time of loss and the time to reach deep within ourselves. The Year of Magical Thinking dwells on these themes and is above all, a reflection on life and its most trying times.
For Didion, grief became a journey to her innermost self, to delve into the mysteries of life and being human. The answers did not always come. At the end of the road there was a need for graceful acceptance and a time to move forward. As Didion herself said in an interview on National Public Radio, " I don’t feel very strong but you don’t have a lot of options."