Death, coping and 'The Year of Magical Thinking'

This Week’s Winner

Born in Samar, Dinah Roma-Sianturi grew up in Manila and studied at De La Salle University. In 1993, she left for Japan on a Monbusho scholarship where she earned an MA in comparative culture. On her return in 1998, she joined De La Salle University where she now teaches with the Department of Literature.

A Zen anecdote tells of a mother’s inconsolable grief over the death of her only son. Throughout the day she wails while walking around the village. She knocks on every door to ask if anyone has seen her child. One day, she ends up in a temple. The monk, aware of her story by now, looks her straight in the eye and asks: “Tell me, which among the homes you’ve visited has not been touched by death?”

The anecdote came to mind after I recently finished reading Joan Didion’s award-winning nonfiction book, The Year of Magical Thinking (2005). It had remained on my table for months, pressed on heavily by a high pile of student papers. I opened it once earlier in an attempt to begin only to realize that it called for my undivided attention.

It must have been the title, after all, that succeeded in luring me away from mundane tasks. While reading the account, I was drawn to ask the same questions as the monk’s: Who has not been touched by death? Who has not been weighed down by sorrow? Who has not thought of the magical in times of loss?

Married for almost 40 years, Didion considered her husband, the novelist John Dunne Gregory, as the only person she could trust. His sudden death taught her painfully what an instant can do. In one moment, her entire life changed. The familiar man in front of her, going about his customary ways of preparing for dinner, fell lifeless, unable to talk, transported to another realm without the grace of a last word or goodbye.

As if her husband’s death was not enough, Didion had to bear the critical condition of their daughter, Quintana, whom they had worried over for weeks and whom they had just visited on the day her husband died. They had suffered at the thought that they would lose their only daughter to something that had started out as a ordinary flu. But its progression into a viral infection and, finally, a septic shock that left her comatose completely threw them off balance.

Yet it was her daughter’s condition that must have braced Didion against grief’s disorienting pull. When the reality finally dawned on her that she had to continue visiting her daughter for whatever life was struggling in her, what she first worried about was how to tell her of the unspeakable — her father’s death.

Didion’s lucid prose maps the confusion of someone who has just experienced death. The way the chapters follow each other does not seem to aim for narrative coherence. In recalling the details of her husband’s death, Didion awakens to the truth that memory is faulty, as we want it only to function in ways that can redeem us. As days and months intervene in her recollection of that fateful night, details begin to fade, even the beloved’s face.

When one is no longer able to work out the sequence of events, then it is the time one begins to be more wishful, magical, in one’s thinking. Death defies chronology. For the longest time, Didion debated against disposing of her husband’s pair of shoes that he had died in. For in the belief of the old, spirits would come back. In believing that he would return somehow, she had asked herself many times: What if he returns only to find out that what had brought him home for years was gone?

My interest in Joan Didion’s personal account draws from my own experience of grief. In 2001, my mother died of colon cancer. I thought I was prepared for it. After the oncologist declared that the cancer had reached my mother’s liver, we were asked to prepare for the downhill battle. I could remember the doctor stressing rather coldly the statement, “It will be fast from here on.”

I read all the websites related to colon cancer, caring for the terminally ill and, finally, the day of death. Didion remarks that she went back to the literature on death and grieving for the questions that medical doctors are oftentimes impatient to answer.

I felt so efficient for having carried out the necessities of dying. Although there was a point when I could not distinguish day from night, I would be kept up by the thought that my weakened mother needed my energy even more.

I recognized the distinctive moments before she went into coma — the dilated pupils, the cold jaundiced skin, the ragged breath. I cleaned her body at the moment I knew she was entering the dark. I stayed focused and alert. I stayed up with her on her last conscious night when she sang songs I never thought she knew. 

I thought that if I carried out these duties I would be spared my grief. That I would, in fact, understand the process of death. Yet for all that I had I prepared for and steeled myself against, the moment of death numbs. Days after my mother’s death, my once-alert mind was taken over by lethargy. The few months that followed, I would vividly see in my dreams my mother’s face looking sick and bereaved.

Didion mentions the same phenomenon and calls it a “vortex.” It is those sudden waves of emotions that suck the grieving into an almost unknown realm. For me, it was my mother’s voice, her residual presence, which I heard in many moments of the day.

Grief spares no one. The Zen monk’s question to the grieving mother was to assure her that she was not alone in her pain. Yet for the universal human experience that it is, the pain of death cuts the individual off from others. The loss haunts every day of our lives. And we go on despite the invisible scars it leaves on us.

I love you even one more day is a phrase that runs through the author’s account. These were the words Didion’s husband whispered to his daughter as she lay hovering at the threshold of here and the beyond. By its repetition, it sounds almost like prayer. And for many of us on the edge of loss, that one more day becomes life’s singular moment.

I love Didion’s book for its fierce honesty in looking death right in the eye. But I appreciate it even more for its power to push us to delve deep into ourselves. There we find the magical resource of our own survival.