Joan Didion The Year of Magical Thinking This book is for John and for Quintana 1

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Joan Didion The Year of Magical Thinking This book is for John and for Quintana 1. Life changes fast Life changes in the instant You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends, The question of selity Those were the first words I wrote after it happened. The computer dating on the Microsoft Word file ("Notes on change.doc") reads "May 20, 2004, 11:11 pm." but that would have been a case of my opening the file and reflexively pressing save when I closed it. I had made no changes to that file in May. I had made no changes to that file since I wrote the words, in January 2004, a day or two or three after the fact For a long time I wrote nothing else. Life changes in the instant The ordinary instant Joan Didion At some point in the interest of remembering what seemed most striking about what had happened, I considered adding those words, the ordinary instant." I saw immediately that there would be no need to add the word "ordinary," because there would be no forgetting it the word never left my mind. It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it. I recognize now that there was nothing unusual in this: confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine errand that ended on the shoulder with the car in flames, the swings where the children were playing as usual when the rattlesnake struck from the ivy. "He was on his way home from work-happy, successful, healthy and then, gone." I read in the account of a psychiatric nurse whose husband was killed in a highway accident. In 1966 I happened to interview many people who had been living in Honolulu on the morning of December 7, 1941; without exception, these people began their accounts of Pearl Harbor by telling me what an ordinary Sunday morning" it had been. "It was just an ordinary beautiful September day," people still say when asked to describe the morning in New York when American Airlines 11 and United Airlines 175 got flown into the World Trade towers. Even the report of the 9/11 Commission opened on this insistently premonitory and yet still dumbstruck narrative note: "Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States." "And then gone." In the midst of life we are in death, Episcopalians say at the graveside. Later I realized that I must have repeated the details of what happened to everyone who came to the house in those first weeks, all those friends and The Year of Magical Thinking relatives who brought food and made drinks and laid out plates on the dining room table for however many people were around at lunch or dinner time, all those who picked up the plates and froze the leftovers and ran the dishwasher and filled our (I could not yet think wy) otherwise empty house even after I had gone into the bedroom (our bedroom, the one in which there still lay on a sofa a faded terrycloth XL robe bought in the 1970s at Richard Carroll in Beverly Hills) and shut the door. Those moments when I was abruptly overtaken by exhaustion are what I remember most clearly about the first days and weeks. I have no memory of telling anyone the details, but I must have done so, because everyone seemed to know them. At one point I considered the possibility that they had picked up the details of the story from one another, but immediately rejected it: the story they had was in cach instance too accurate to have been passed from hand to hand. It had come from me Another reason I knew that the story had come from me was that no version I heard included the details I could not yet face, for example the blood on the living room floor that stayed there until José came in the next morning and cleaned it up. José. Who was part of our household. Who was supposed to be flying to Las Vegas later that day, December 31, but never went José was crying that morning as he cleaned up the blood, When I first told him what had happened he had not understood. Clearly 1 was not the ideal teller of this story, something about my version had been at once too of hand and too elliptical, something in my tone had failed to convey the central fact in the situation (I would encounter the same failure later when I had to tell Quintana), but by the time José saw the blood he understood. I had picked up the abandoned syringes and ECG electrodes before he came in that morning but I could not face the blood. Joan Didion 2. December 30, 2003, a Tuesday We had seen Quintana in the sixth-floor ICU at Beth Israel North We had come home We had discussed whether to go out for dinner or eat in. I said I would build a fire, we could cat in I built the fire, I started dinner, I asked John if he wanted a drink I got him a Scotch and gave it to him in the living room, where he was reading in the chair by the fire where he habitually sat. The book he was reading was by David Fromkin, a bound galley of Europe Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914? I finished getting dinner, I set the table in the living room where, when we were home alone, we could eat within sight of The Year of Magical Thinking the fire. I find myself stressing the fire because fires were important to us. I grew up in California, John and I lived there together for twenty-four years, in California we heated our houses by building fires. We built fires even on summer evenings, because the fog came in. Fires said we were home, we had drawn the circle, we were safe through the night. I lit the candles. John asked for a second drink before sitting down. I gave it to him. We sit down. My attention was on mixing the salad. John was talking, then he wasn't At one point in the seconds or minute before he stopped talking he had asked me if I had used single-malt Scotch for his second drink. I had said no, I used the same Scotch I had used for his first drink, "Good," he had said. "I don't know why but I don't think you should mix them." At another point in those seconds or that minute he had been talking about why World War One was the critical event from which the entire rest of the twentieth century flowed I have no idea which subject we were on the Scotch or World War One, at the instant he stopped talking I only remember looking up. His left hand was raised and he was slumped motionless. At first I thought he was making a failed joke, an attempt to make the difficulty of the day seem manageable. I remember saying Don do thar. When he did not respond my first thought was that he had Started to eat and choked. I remember trying to lift him far enough from the back of the chair to give him the Heimlich. I remember the sense of his weight as he fell forward, first against 12 13 Joan Didion the table, then to the floor. In the kitchen by the telephone I had taped a card with the New York-Presbyterian ambulance numbers. I had not taped the numbers by the telephone because I anticipated a moment like this. I had taped the numbers by the telephone in case someone in the building needed an ambulance. Someone else. I called one of the numbers. A dispatcher asked if he was breathing. I said Just come. When the paramedics came I tried to tell them what had happened but before I could finish they had transformed the part of the living room where John lay into an emergency department. One of them (there were three, maybe four, even an hour later I could not have said) was talking to the hospital about the electrocardiogram they seemed already to be transmitting. Another was opening the first or second of what would be many syringes for injection (Epinephrine? Lidocaine? Procainamide? The names came to mind but I had no idea from where. I remember saying that he might have choked. This was dismissed with a finger swipe: the airway was clear. They seemed now to be using defibrillating paddles, an attempt to restore a rhythm. They got something that could have been a normal heartbeat (or I thought they did, we had all been silent, there was a sharp jump), then lost it, and started again. "He's still fibbing," I remember the one on the telephone saying "V-fibbing," John's cardiologist said the next morning when he called from Nantucket. "They would have said "V-fibbing.' V for ventricular." Maybe they said "V-fibbing" and maybe they did not. Atrial fibrillation did not immediately or necessarily cause cardiac The Year of Magical Thinking arrest. Ventricular did. Maybe ventricular was the given. I remember trying to straighten out in my mind what would happen next. Since there was an ambulance crew in the living room, the next logical step would be going to the hospital. It occurred to me that the crew could decide very suddenly to go to the hospital and I would not be ready. I would not have in hand what I needed to take. I would waste time, get left behind. I found my handbag and a set of keys and a summary John's doctor had made of his medical history. When I got back to the living room the paramedies were watching the computer monitor they had set up on the floor. I could not see the monitor so I watched their faces. I remember one glancing at the others. When the decision was made to move it happened very fast. I followed them to the elevator and asked if I could go with them. They said they were taking the gurney down first, I could go in the second ambulance, One of them waited with me for the elevator to come back up. By the time he and I got into the second ambulance the ambulance carrying the gurney was pulling away from the front of the building. The distance from our building to the part of New York-Presbyterian that used to be New York Hospital is six crosstown blocks. I have no memory of sirens. I have no memory of traffic. When we arrived at the emergency entrance to the hospital the gumey was already disappearing into the building. A man was waiting in the driveway. Everyone else in sight was wearing scrubs. He was not. "Is this the wife," he said to the driver, then turned to me. "I'm your social worker," he said, and I guess that is when I must have known. "I opened the door and I seen the man in the dress greens and I knew. I immediately knew." This was what the mother of a 14 15 Joan Didion nineteen-year-old killed by a bomb in Kirkuk said on an HBO documentary quoted by Bob Herbert in The New York Times on the morning of November 12, 2004. "But I thought that if, as long as I didn't let him in, he couldn't tell me. And then it none of that would've happened. So he kept saying, "Ma'am, I need to come in. And I kept telling him, 'I'm sorry, but you can't come When I read this at breakfast almost eleven months after the night with the ambulance and the social worker I recognized the thinking as my own Inside the emergency room I could see the gurney being pushed into a cubicle, propelled by more people in scrubs. Someone told me to wait in the reception area. I did. There was a line for admittance paperwork. Waiting in the line seemed the constructive thing to do. Waiting in the line said that there was still time to deal with this, I had copies of the insurance cards in my handbag, this was not a hospital I had ever negotiated New York Hospital was the Cornell part of New York-Presbyterian, the part I knew was the Columbia part, Columbia-Presbyterian, at 168th and Broadway, twenty minutes away at best, too far in this kind of emergency but I could make this unfamiliar hospital work, I could be useful, I could arrange the transfer to Columbia- Presbyterian once he was stabilized. I was fixed on the details of this imminent transfer to Columbia (he would need a bed with telemetry, eventually I could also get Quintana transferred to Columbia, the night she was admitted to Beth Israel North I had written on a card the beeper numbers of several Columbia doctors, one or another of them could make all this happen) when the social worker reappeared and guided me from the paperwork line into an empty room off the reception area. "You can wait here," he said. I waited. The room was cold, or I was. I wondered how much time had passed between the time I called the The Year of Magical Thinking ambulance and the arrival of the paramedics. It had seemed no time at all (a more in the eye of God was the phrase that came to me in the room off the reception area) but it must have been at the minimum several minutes. I used to have on a bulletin board in my office, for reasons having to do with a plot point in a movie, a pink index card on which I had typed a sentence from The Merck Manual about how long the brain can be deprived of oxygen. The image of the pink index card was coming back to me in the room off the reception area: "Tissue anoxia for > 4 to 6 min. can result in irreversible brain damage or death." I was telling myself that I must be misremembering the sentence when the social worker reappeared, He had with him a man he introduced as "your husband's doctor." There was a silence. "He's dead, isn't he," I heard myself say to the doctor. The doctor looked at the social worker. "It's okay," the social worker said. "She's a pretty cool customer." They took me into the curtained cubicle where John lay, alone now. They asked if I wanted a priest I said yes. A priest appeared and said the words. I thanked him. They gave me the silver clip in which John kept his driver's license and credit cards. They gave me the cash that had been in his pocket. They gave me his watch. They gave me his cell phone. They gave me a plastic bag in which they said I would find his clothes. I thanked them. The social worker asked if he could do anything more for me. I said he could put me in a taxi. He did. I thanked him. "Do you have money for the fare," he asked. I said I did, the cool customer. When I walked into the apartment and saw John's jacket and scarf still lying on the chair where he had dropped them when we came in from seeing Quintana at Beth Israel North (the red cashmere scarl, the Patagonia windbreaker that had been the crew jacket on Up Close & Personal) I wondered what an uncool customer would be allowed to do. Break down? Require sedation? Scream? 16 17 Joan Didion The Year of Magical Thinking license, due for renewal on May 25, 2004; a Chase ATM card; an American Express card; a Wells Fargo MasterCard; a Metropolitan Museum card; a Writers Guild of America West card (it was the season before Academy voting, when you could use a WGAW card to see movies free, he must have gone to a movie, I did not remember); a Medicare card; a Metro card; and a card issued by Medtronic with the legend "I have a Kappa 900 SR pacemaker implanted," the serial number of the device, a number to call for the doctor who implanted it, and the notation "Implant Date: 03 Jun 2003." I remember combining the cash that had been in his pocket with the cash in my own bag, smoothing the bills, taking special care to interleaf twenties with twenties, tens with tens, fives and ones with fives and ones. I remember thinking as I did this that he would see that I was handling things. I remember thinking that I needed to discuss this with John. There was nothing I did not discuss with John Because we were both writers and both worked at home our days were filled with the sound of each other's voices. I did not always think he was right nor did he always think was right but we were cach the person the other trusted. There was no separation between our investments or interests in any given situation. Many people assumed that we must be, since sometimes one and sometimes the other would get the better review, the bigger advance, in some way "competitive," that our private life must be a minefield of professional envies and resentments. This was so far from the case that the general insistence on it came to suggest certain lacunae in the popular understanding of marriage That had been one more thing we discussed. What I remember about the apartment the night I came home alone from New York Hospital was its silence. In the plastic bag I had been given at the hospital there were a pair of corduroy pants, a wool shirt, a belt, and I think nothing else. The legs of the corduroy pants had been slit open, supposed by the paramedies. There was blood on the shirt. The belt was braided. I remember putting his cell phone in the charger on his desk. I remember putting his silver clip in the box in the bedroom in which we kept passports and birth certificates and proof of jury service. I look now at the clip and see that these were the cards he was carrying a New York State driver's When I saw him in the curtained cubicle in the emergency room at New York Hospital there was a chip in one of his front teeth, I supposed from the fall, since there were also bruises on his face. When I identified his body the next day at Frank E. Campbell the bruises were not apparent. It occurred to me that masking the bruises must have been what the undertaker meant when I said no embalming and he said in that case we'll just clean him up." The part with the undertaker remains remote. I had arrived at Frank E. Campbell so determined to avoid any inappropriate response (tears, anger, helpless laughter at the Ox. like hush) that I had shut down all response. After my mother died the undertaker who picked up her body left in its place on the bed an artificial rose. My brother had told me this, offended to the core. I would be armed against artificial roses. I remember making a brisk decision about a coffin. I remember that in the office where I signed the papers there was a grandfather's clock, 18 Joan Didion The Year of Magical Thinking usual, even for a time of the year when most people in the building left for more clement venues: not running. John's nephew Tony Dunne, who was with me, mentioned to the undertaker that the clock was not running. The undertaker, as if pleased to elucidate a decorative element, explained that the clock had not run in some years, but was retained as a kind of memorial to a previous incarnation of the firm. He seemed to be offering the clock as a lesson 1 concentrated on Quintana. I could shut out what the undertaker was saying but I could not shut out the lines I was hearing as I concentrated on Quintana: Full fathom five thy father lies / Those are parts that were his eyes. NOTE: Paramedics arrived at 9:20 p.m. for Mr. Dunne. Mr. Dunne was taken to hospital at 10:05p.m. NOTE: Lightbulb out on AB passenger elevator Eight months later I asked the manager of our apartment building if he still had the log kept by the doormen for the night of December 30. I know there was a log, I had been for three years president of the board of the building, the door log was intrinsic to building procedure. The next day the manager sent me the page for December 30. According to the log the doormen that night were Michael Flynn and Vasile Ionescu. I had not remembered that. Vasile Ionescu and John had a routine with which they amused themselves in the elevator, a small game, between an exile from Ceausescu's Romania and an Irish Catholic from West Hartford, Connecticut, based on a shared appreciation of political posturing, "So where is bin Laden," Vasile would say when John got onto the elevator, the point being to come up with ever more improbable suggestions: "Could bin Laden be in the penthouse?" "in the maisonette?" "In the fitness room?" When I saw Vasile's name on the log it occurred to me that I could not remember if he had initiated this game when we came in from Beth Israel North in the early evening of December 30. The log for that evening showed only two entries, fewer than The A-B elevator was our clevator, the elevator on which the paramedics came up at 9:20 pm, the elevator on which they took John (and me) downstairs to the ambulance at 10:05 p.m., the elevator on which I returned alone to our apartment at a time not noted. I had not noticed a lightbulb being out on the elevator. Nor had I noticed that the paramedies were in the apartment for forty. five minutes. I had always described it as "fifteen or twenty minutes. If they were here that long does it mean that he was alive? I put this question to a doctor I knew. "Sometimes they'll work that long," he said. It was a while before I realized that this in no way addressed the question The death certificate, when I got it, pave the time of death us 10:18 p.m., December 30, 2003. I had been asked before I left the hospital if I would authorize an autopsy, I had said yes. I later read that asking a survivor to authorize an autopsy is seen in hospitals as delicate, sensitive, often the most difficult of the routine steps that follow a death. Doctors themselves, according to many studies (for example 20 21 The Year of Magical Thinking night was once spelling him on a drive from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. He had been dozing in the passenger seat of the Corvette we then had. He had opened his eyes. After a moment he had said, very carefully, "I might take it a little slower." I had no sense of unusual speed and glanced at the speedometer. I was doing 120 Yet Joan Didion worked) while I worked in the garden. It was a small, even miniature, garden with gravel paths and a rose arbor and beds edged with thyme and santolina and feverfew. I had convinced John a few years before that we should tear out a lawn to plant this garden. To my surprise, since he had shown no previous interest in gardens, he regarded the finished product as an almost mystical gift. Just before five on those summer afternoons we would swim and then go into the library wrapped in towels to watch Teiko, a BBC series, then in syndication about a number of satisfyingly predictable English women (one was immature and selfish, another seemed to have been written with Mrs. Miniver in mind) imprisoned by the Japanese in Malaya during World War Two. After each afternoon's Tenko segment we would go upstairs and work another hour or two, John in his office at the top of the stairs, me in the glassed-in porch across the hall that had become my office. At seven or seven-thirty we would go out to dinner, many nights at Morton's. Morton's felt right that summer. There was always shrimp quesadilla, chicken with black beans. There was always someone we knew. The room was cool and polished and dark inside but you could see the twilight outside. John did not like driving at night by then. This was one reason, I later learned, that he wanted to spend more time in New York, a wish that at the time remained mysterious to me. One night that summer he asked me to drive home after dinner at Anthea Sylbert's house on Camino Palmero in Hollywood. I remember thinking how remarkable this was. Anthea lived less than a block from a house on Franklin Avenue in which we had lived from 1967 until 1971, so it was not a question of reconnoitering a new neighborhood. It had occurred to me as I started the ignition that I could count on my fingers the number of times I had driven when John was in the car, the single other time I could remember that A drive across the Mojave was one thing. There had been no previous time when he asked me to drive home from dinner in town: this evening on Camino Palmero was unprecedented. So was the fact that at the end of the forty-minute drive to Brentwood Park he pronounced it "well driven." He mentioned those afternoons with the pool and the garden and Tenko several times during the year before he died. Philippe Aries, in The Hour of Our Death points out that the essential characteristic of death as it appears in the Chanson de Roland is that the death, even if sudden or accidental, "gives advance warning of its arrival." Gawain is asked: "Ah, good my lord, think you then so soon to die?" Gawain answers: "I tell you that I shall not live two days." Aries notes: "Neither his doctor nor his friends nor the priests (the latter are absent and forgotten) know as much about it as he. Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left." You sit down to dinner "You can use it if you want to," John had said when I gave him the note he had dictated a week or two before. And then gone 24 25 Joan Didion Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be. It was not what I felt when my parents died: my father died a few days short of his eighty-fifth birthday and my mother a month short of her ninety-first, both after some years of increasing debility. What I felt in each instance was sadness, loneliness (the loneliness of the abandoned child of whatever age), regret for time gone by, for things unsaid, for my inability to share or even in any real way to acknowledge, at the end, the pain and helplessness and physical humiliation they each endured. I understood the inevitability of each of their deaths. I had been expecting (fearing, dreading, anticipating) those deaths all my life. They remained, when they did occur, distanced, at a remove from the ongoing dailiness of my life. After my mother died I received a letter from a friend in Chicago, a former Maryknoll priest, who precisely intuited what I felt. The death of a parent, he wrote, "despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets of reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago. We might, in that indeterminate period they call mourning, be in a submarine, silent on the ocean's bed, aware of the depth charges, now near and now far, buffeting us with recollections." My father was dead, my mother was dead, I would need for a while to watch for mines, but I would still get up in the morning and send out the laundry I would still plan a menu for Easter lunch. I would still remember to renew my passport, The Year of Magical Thinking Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of "waves." Eric Lindemann, who was chief of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital in the 1940s and interviewed many family members of those killed in the 1942 Coconut Grove fire, defined the phenomenon with absolute specificity in a famous 1944 study: "sensations of somatic distress occurring in waves lasting from twenty minutes to an hour at a time, a feeling of tightness in the throat, choking with shortness of breath, need for sighing, and an empty feeling in the abdomen, lack of muscular power, and an intense subjective distress described as tension or mental pain." Tightness in the throat Choking, need for sighing Such waves began for me on the morning of December 31, 2003, seven or eight hours after the fact, when I woke alone in the apartment. I do not remember crying the night before I had entered at the moment it happened a kind of shock in which the only thought I allowed myself was that there must be certain things I needed to do. There had been certain things I had needed to do while the ambulance crew was in the living room. I had needed for example to get the copy of John's medical summary, so I could take it with me to the hospital. I had needed for example to bank the fire, because I would be leaving it. There had been certain things I had needed to do at the hospital. I had needed for example to stand in the line. I had needed for example to focus on the bed with telemetry he would need for the transfer to Columbia-Presbyterian. 26 27 Joan Didion Once I got back from the hospital there had again been certain things I needed to do. I could not identify all of these things but I did know one of them: I needed, before I did anything else, to tell John's brother Nick. It had seemed too late in the evening to call their older brother Dick on Cape Cod (he went to bed early, his health had not been good, I did not want to wake him with bad news) but I needed to tell Nick. I did not plan how to do this. 1 just sat on the bed and picked up the phone and dialed the number of his house in Connecticut. He answered. I told him. After I put down the phone, in what I can only describe as a new neural pattern of dialing numbers and saying the words, I picked it up again. I could not call Quintana (she was still where we had left her a few hours before, unconscious in the ICU at Beth Israel North) but I could call Gerry, her husband of five months, and I could call my brother, Jim, who would be at his house in Pebble Beach. Gerry said he would come over. I said there was no need to come over, I would be fine. Jim said he would get a flight said there was no need to think about a flight, we would talk in the morning, I was trying to think what to do next when the phone rang. It was John's and my agent, Lynn Nesbit, a friend since I suppose the late sixties. It was not clear to me at the time how she knew but she did it had something to do with a mutual friend to whom both Nick and Lynn seemed in the last minute to have spoken) and she was calling from a taxi on her way to our apartment. At one level I was relieved (Lynn knew how to manage things. Lynn would know what it was that I was supposed to be doing) and at another I was bewildered: how could I deal at this moment with company? What would we do, would we sit in the living room with the syringes and the ECG electrodes and the blood still on the floor, should I rekindle what was left of the fire, would we have a drink, would she have eaten? Had I eaten? The Year of Magical Thinking The instant in which I asked myself whether I had eaten was the first intimation of what was to come: if I thought of food, I learned that night, I would throw up Lynn arrived. We sat in the part of the living room where the blood and electrodes and syringes were not I remember thinking as I was talking to Lynn (this was the part I could not say that the blood must have come from the fall: he had fallen on his face, there was the chipped tooth I had noticed in the emergency room, the tooth could have cut the inside of his mouth. Lynn picked up the phone and said that she was calling Christopher This was another bewilderment: the Christopher I knew best was Christopher Dickey, but he was in either Paris or Dubai and in any case Lynn would have said Chris, not Christopher. I found my mind veering to the autopsy. It could even be happening as I sat there. Then I realized that the Christopher to whom Lynn was talking was Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, who was the chief obituary writer for The New York Times. I remember a sense of shock. I wanted to say nor yer but my mouth had gone dry. I could deal with "autopsy" but the notion of "obituary" had not occurred to me. "Obituary," unlike "autopsy," which was between me and John and the hospital, meant it had happened. I found myself wondering, with no sense of illogie, if it had also happened in Los Angeles. I was trying to work out what time it had been when he died and whether it was that time yet in Los Angeles. (Was there time to go back? Could we have a different ending on Pacific time?) I recall being seized by a pressing need not to let anyone at 28 29 Joan Didion Calvin Trillin spoke, David Halberstam spoke, Quintana's best friend Susan Traylor spoke. Susanna Moore read a fragment from "East Coker," the part about how "one has only learnt to get the better of words / For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which / One is no longer disposed to say it." Nick read Catullus, "On His Brother's Death." Quintana, still weak but her voice steady, standing in a black dress in the same cathedral where she had eight months before been married, read a poem she had written to her father. I had done it. I had acknowledged that he was dead. I had done this in as public away as I could conceive. Yet my thinking on this point remained suspiciously fluid. At dinner in the late spring or early summer I happened to meet a prominent academic theologian. Someone at the table raised a question about faith. The theologian spoke of ritual itself being a form of faith. My reaction was unexpressed but negative, vehement, excessive even to me. Later I realized that my immediate thought had been: But I did the rival. I did it all. I did St. John the Divine, I did the chant in Latin, I did the Catholic priest and the Episcopal priest, I did "For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past" and I did "In paradisum dedicant angell." And it still didny bring him back, "Bringing him back" had been through those months my hidden focus, a magic trick. By late summer I was beginning to see this clearly. "Seeing it clearly" did not yet allow me to give away the clothes he would need The Year of Magical Thinking In time of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control Given that grief remained the most general of afflictions its literature seemed remarkably spare. There was the journal C. S. Lewis kept after the death of his wife, A Grief Observed. There was the occasional passage in one or another novel, for example Thomas Mann's description in The Magic Mountain of the effect on Hermann Castorp of his wife's death: "His spirit was troubled; he shrank within himself, his benumbed brain made him blunder in his business, so that the firm of Castorp and Son suffered sensible financial losses, and the next spring, while inspecting warehouses on the windy landing-stage, he got inflammation of the lungs. The fever was too much for his shaken heart, and in five days, notwithstanding all Dr. Heidekind's care, he died." There were, in classical ballets, the moments when one or another abandoned lover tries to find and resurrect one or another loved one, the blued light, the white tutus, the pas de deux with the loved one that foreshadows the final return to the dead: la danse des ombres, the dance of the shades. There were certain poems, in fact many poems. There was a day or two when I relied on Matthew Arnold, "The Forsaken Merman": Children's voices should be doar (Call once more) to a mother's car, Children voices, wild with pain Surely she will come again! 40 41 Joan Didion daughter, Cat, who had been killed by an IRA bomb while having dinner with her mother in a restaurant on Charlotte Street in London. This is part of what he wrote: The Year of Magical Thinking question: why was she in the ladies' room when the bomb went off? Finally she tells him: "Where you was?" she would say, and "Where did the morning went?" He wrote them all down and crammed them into the tiny secret drawer in the maple desk Barry Stukin had given him and Lee as a wedding present....Cat in her school tartan. Cat who could call her bath a "bathment" and the butterflies for a kindergarten experiment "flybutters." Cat who had made up her first poem at the age of seven: "I'm going to marry / A boy named Harry / He rides horses / And handles divorces." You never gave me much credit for being Cat's mother, but I did raise her. I took care of her the day she got her period the first time and I remember when she was a little girl she called my bedroom her sweet second room and she called spaghetti buzzghetti and she called people who came to the house hellos. She said where you was and where did the morning went and you told Thayer, you son of a bitch, you wanted someone to remember her. So she told me she was pregnant, it was an accident, and she wanted to know what to do and I went into the ladies' room because I knew I was going to cry and I didn't want to cry in front of her and I wanted to get the tears out of the way so I could act sensibly and then I heard the bomb and when I finally got out part of her was in the sherbet and part of her was in the street and you, you son of a bitch, you want someone to remember her The Broken Man was in that drawer. The Broken Man was what Cat called fear and death and the unknown. I had a bad dream about the Broken Man, she would say. Don't let the Broken Man catch me. If the Broken Man comes, I'll hang onto the fence and won't let him take me.... He wondered if the Broken Man had time to frighten Cat before she died I believe John would have said that Dutch Shea, Je was about I see now what I had failed to see in 1982, the year Dutch Shea, Jr. was published: this was a novel about grief. The literature would have said that Dutch She was undergoing pathological bereavement. The diagnostic signs would have been these: He is obsessed with the moment cat died. He plays and replays the scene, as if rerunning it could reveal a different ending the restaurant on Charlotte Street, the endive salad, Cat's lavender espadrilles, the bomb, Cat's head in the dessert trolley. He tortures his ex-wife, Cat's mother, with a single repeated When he began the novel he already knew what the last words would be, not only the last words of the novel but the last words thought by Dutch Shea before he shoots himself: "I believe in Cat. I believe in God." Credo in Deum. The first words of the Catholic catechism. Was it about faith or was it about griel? Were faith and grief the same thing? 46 47 Joan Didion Were we unusually dependent on one another the summer we swam and watched Tenko and went to dinner at Morton's? Or were we unusually lucky? If I were alone could he come back to me on the smile? Would he say get a table at Ernie's? PSA and the smile no longer exist, sold to US Airways and then painted off the planes. Ernie's no longer exists, but was briefly re-created by Alfred Hitchcock, for Verrigo. James Stewart first sees Kim Novak at Emie's. Later she falls from the bell tower (also re-created, an effect) at Mission San Juan Bautista We were married at San Juan Bautista, On a January afternoon when the blossoms were showing in the orchards off 101 When there were still orchards off 101. The Year of Magical Thinking undergraduate at Berkeley, but now I could remember not only the poem but much of what had been said about it in whichever class I had heard it analyzed. "Rose Aylmer" worked, whoever was teaching this class had said, because the overblown and therefore meaningless praise for the deceased in the first four lines ("Ah, what avails the sceptred race! / Ah, what the form divine! / What every virtue, every grace! / Rose Aylmer, all were thine) gets brought into sudden, even shocking relief by "the hard sweet wisdom" of the last two lines, which suggest that mourning has its place but also its limits: "A night of memories and sighs / I consecrate to thee." ***A night of memories and sighs," I remembered the lecturer repeating. " night. One night. It might be all night but he doesn't even say all night, he says a night, not a matter of a lifetime, a matter of some hours." Hard sweet wisdom. Clearly, since "Rose Aylmer" had remained embedded in my memory. I believed it as an undergraduate to offer a lesson for survival. No. The way you got sideswiped was by going back. The blossoms showing in the orchards off 101 was the incorrect track For several weeks after it happened I tried to keep myself on the correct track (the narrow track, the track on which there was no going back) by repeating to myself the last two lines of "Rose Aylmer," Walter Savage Landor's 1806 elegy to the memory of a daughter of Lord Aylmer's who had died at age twenty in Calcutta. I had not thought of "Rose Aylmer" since I was an December 30, 2003 We had seen Quintana in the sixth-floor ICU at Beth Israel North Where she would remain for another twenty-four days. Unusual dependency (is that a way of saying "marriage"? "husband and wife"? "mother and child? "nuclear family") is not the only situation in which complicated or pathological grief can occur. Another, I read in the literature, is one in which the 48 49 Joan Didion grieving process is interrupted by "circumstantial factors," say by "a delay in the funeral," or by an illness or second death in the family." I read an explanation, by Vamik D. Volkan, M.D., a professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, of what he called "re-grief therapy," a technique developed at the University of Virginia for the treatment of "established pathological mourners." In such therapy, according to Dr. Volkan, a point occurs at which: we help the patient to review the circumstances of the death how it occurred, the patient's reaction to the news and to viewing the body, the events of the funeral, etc. Anger usually appears at this point if the therapy is going well, it is at first diffused, then directed toward others, and finally directed toward the dead. Abreactions what Bibring [E. Bibring, 1954, "Psychoanalysis and the Dynamic Psychotherapies." Journal of the American Psychoanalwic Association 2:745 ff.) calls "emotional reliving" may then take place and demonstrate to the patient the actuality of his repressed impulses. Using our understanding of the psychodynamics involved in the patient's need to keep the lost one alive, we can then explain and interpret the relationship that had existed between the patient and the one who died. The Year of Magical Thinking 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 graves 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 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 have been useful with the thermometer bor you were norther I don't need to "review the circumstances of the death." I was there I didn't get the news, "I didn "Wow" the body. I was there. I catch myself, I stop I realize that I am directing irrational anger toward the entirely unknown Dr. Volkan in Charlottesville. 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 that had existed between the patient and the one who died"? Were you watching Tenko with me and the lost one" in Persons under the shock of genuine affliction are not only upset mentally but are all unbalanced physically. No matter how calm and controlled they seemingly may be no one can under such circumstances be normal. Their 50 51 The Year of Magical Thinking Where no soms come. Joan Didion the Los Angeles Times learn what had happened by reading it in The New York Times. I called our closest friend at the Los Angeles Times, Tim Rutten. I have no memory of what Lynn and I did then. I remember her saying that she would stay the night, but I said no, I would be fine alone. And I was Until the morning. When, only half awake, I tried to think why I was alone in the bed. There was a leaden feeling. It was the same leaden feeling with which I woke on mornings after John and I had fought. Had we had a fight? What about how had it started, how could we fix it if I could not remember how it started? Then I remembered For several weeks that would be the way I woke to the day. I see now that my insistence on spending that first night alone was more complicated than it seemed, a primitive instinct. Of course I knew John was dead. Of course I had already delivered the definitive news to his brother and to my brother and to Quintana's husband. The New York Times knew. The Los Angeles Times knew, Yet I was myself in no way prepared to accept this news as final: there was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible. That was why I needed to be alone After that first night I would not be alone for wocks (Jim and his wife Gloria would fly in from California the next day. Nick would come back to town, Tony and his wife Rosemary would come down from Connecticut, José would not go to Las Vegas, our assistant Sharon would come back from skiing, there would never not be people in the house), but I needed that first night to be alone. I needed to be alone so that he could come back. This was the beginning of my year of magical thinking. / wake and feel the fell of dark, nor day One of several lines from different poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins that John strung together during the months immediately after his younger brother committed suicide, a kind of improvised rosary , O the mind, mind has mountains, cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap May who ne'er hung there. I wake and feel the fell of dark, nor day, And I have asked to be 30 31 Joan Didion The power of grief to derange the mind has in fact been exhaustively noted. The act of grieving, Freud told us in his 1917 "Mourning and Melancholia," "involves grave departures from the normal attitude to life." Yet, he pointed out, grief remains peculiar among derangements: "It never occurs to us to regard it as a pathological condition and to refer it to medical treatment." We rely instead on its being overcome after a certain lapse of time." We view any interference with it as useless and even harmful." Melanie Klein, in her 1940 "Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States," made a similar assessment: "The moumer is in fact ill, but because this state of mind is common and seems so natural to us, we do not call mourning an illness.... To put my conclusion more precisely: I should say that in mourning the subject goes through a modified and transitory manic-depressive state and overcomes it." Notice the stress on "overcoming" it. It was deep into the summer, some months after the night when I needed to be alone so that he could come back, before ! recognized that through the winter and spring there had been occasions on which I was incapable of thinking rationally. I was The Year of Magical Thinking thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome. In my case this disordered thinking had been covert, noticed I think by no one else, hidden even from me, but it had also been, in retrospect, both urgent and constant. In retrospect there had been signs, warning flags should have noticed. There had been for example the matter of the obituaries, I could not read them. This continued from December 31, when the first obituaries appeared, until February 29, the night of the 2004 Academy Awards, when I saw a photograph of John in the Academy's "In Memoriam montage. When I saw the photograph I realized for the first time why the obituaries had so disturbed me. I had allowed other people to think he was dead. I had allowed him to be buried alive, Another such flag: there had come a point (late February, early March, after Quintana had left the hospital but before the funeral that had waited on her recovery) when it had occurred to me that I was supposed to give John's clothes away. Many people had mentioned the necessity for giving the clothes away, usually in the well-intentioned but (as it turns out) misguided form of offering to help me do this. I had resisted. I had no idea why. I myself remembered, after my father died, helping my mother separate his clothes into stacks for Goodwill and "better" stacks for the charity thrift shop where my sister-in-law Gloria volunteered. After my mother died Gloria and I and Quintana and Gloria and Jim's daughters had done the same with her clothes. It was part of what people did after a death, part of the ritual, some kind of duty I began. I cleared a shelf on which John had stacked sweatshirts, T-shirts, the clothes he wore when we walked in 32 33 Joan Didion Central Park in the early morning. We walked every morning. We did not always walk together because we liked different routes but we would keep the other's route in mind and intersect before we left the park. The clothes on this shelf were as familiar to me as my own. I closed my mind to this. I set aside certain things (a faded sweatshirt I particularly remembered him wearing, a Canyon Ranch T-shirt Quintana had brought him from Arizona), but I put most of what was on this shelf into bags and took the bags across the street to St. James' Episcopal Church Emboldened, I opened a closet and filled more bags: New Balance sneakers, all-weather shoes, Brooks Brothers shorts, bag after bag of socks. I took the bags to St. James'. One day a few weeks later I gathered up more bags and took them to John's office, where he had kept his clothes. I was not yet prepared to address the suits and shirts and jackets but I thought I could handle what remained of the shoes, a start I stopped at the door to the room. I could not give away the rest of his shoes. stood there for a moment, then realized why: he would need shoes if he was to return The recognition of this thought by no means eradicated the thought I have still not tried to determine (say, by giving away the shoes) if the thought has lost its power, The Year of Magical Thinking determinedly authorized an autopsy, there was also a level of derangement on which I reasoned that an autopsy could show that what had gone wrong was something simple. It could have been no more than a transitory blockage or arrhythmia. It could have required only a minor adjustment change in medication, say, or the resetting of a pacemaker. In this case, the reasoning went, they might still be able to fix it. I recall being struck by an interview, during the 2004 campaign, in which Teresa Heinz Kerry talked about the sudden death of her first husband. After the plane crash that killed John Heinz, she said in the interview, she had felt very strongly that she needed to leave Washington and go back to Pittsburgh, Of course she "needed" to go back to Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, not Washington, was the place to which he might come back The autopsy did not in fact take place the night John was declared dead The autopsy did not take place until eleven the next morning. I realize now that the autopsy could have taken place only after the man I did not know at New York Hospital made the phone call to me, on the morning of December 31. The man who made the call was not my social worker," not "my husband's doctor," not, as John and I might have said to each other, our friend from the bridge. "Not our friend from the bridge was family shorthand, having to do with how his Aunt Harriet Burns described subsequent sightings of recently encountered strangers, for example seeing outside the Friendly's in West Hartford the same Cadillac Seville that had earlier cut her off on the Bulkeley Bridge. "Our friend from the bridge," she would say. I was O reflection I see the autopsy itself as the first example of this kind of thinking, Whatever else had been in my mind when I so 34 35 Joan Didion thinking about John saying "not our friend from the bridge" as I listened to the man on the telephone. I recall expressions of sympathy. I recall offers of assistance. He seemed to be avoiding some point. He was calling, he said then, to ask if I would donate my husband's organs Many things went through my mind at this instant. The first word that went through my mind was "no." Simultaneously! remembered Quintana mentioning at dinner one night that she had identified herself as an organ donor when she renewed her driver's license. She had asked John if he had. He had said no. They had discussed it I had changed the subject I had been unable to think of either of them dead. The man on the telephone was still talking. I was thinking: If she were to die today in the ICU at Beth Israel North, would this come up? What would I do? What would I do now? I heard myself saying to the man on the telephone that my husband's and my daughter was unconscious. I heard myself saying that I did not feel capable of making such a decision before our daughter even knew he was dead. This seemed to me at the time a reasonable response. Only after I hung up did it occur to me that nothing about it was reasonable. This thought was immediately (and usefully- notice the instant mobilization of cognitive white cells) supplanted by another: there had been in this call something that did not add up. There had been a contradiction in it. This man had The Year of Magical Thinking been talking about donating organs, but there was no way at this point to do a productive organ harvest: John had not been on life support. He had not been on life support when I saw him in the curtained cubicle in the emergency room. He had not been on life support when the priest came. All organs would have shut down. Then I remembered: the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner's office. John and I had been there together one morning in 1985 or 1986. There had been someone from the eye bank tagging bodies for comea removal. Those bodies in the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner's office had not been on life support. This man from New York Hospital, then, was talking about taking only the comeas, the eyes. Then why not say so? Why misrepresent this to me? Why make this call and not just say "his eyes"? I took the silver clip the social worker had given me the night before from the box in the bedroom and looked at the driver's license. Eyes: BL, the license read, Restrictions: Corrective Lenses Why make this call and not just say what you wanted His eyes. His blue eyes. His blue imperfect eyes. and what i want to know is how do you like your owwwel boy Mister Death I could not that moming remember who wrote those lines. I thought it was E. E. Cummings but I could not be sure. I did not have a volume of Cummings but found an anthology on a poetry shelf in the bedroom, an old textbook of John's, published in 36 37 The Year of Magical Thinking Joan Didion 1949, when he would have been at Portsmouth Priory, the Benedictine boarding school near Newport to which he was sent after his father died (His father's death: sudden, cardiac, in his early fifties, I should have taken that warning) If we happened to be anywhere around Newport John would take me to Portsmouth to hear the Gregorian chant at vespers. It was something that moved him. On the flyleaf of the anthology there was written the name Dunne, in small careful handwriting, and then, in the same handwriting, blue ink, fountain pen blue ink, these guides to study: 1) What is the meaning of the poem and what is the experience? 2) Whar thought or reflection does the experience lead us to? 3) What mood feeling, emotion is stirred or created by the poem as a whole? I put the book back on the shelf. It would be some months before I remembered to confirm that the lines were in fact E. E. Cummings. It would also be some months before it occurred to me that my anger at this unknown caller from New York Hospital reflected another version of the primitive dread that had not for me been awakened by the autopsy question What was the meaning and what the experience? To what thought or reflection did the experience lead us? How could he come back if they took his organs, how could he come back if he had no shoes? On most surface levels I seemed rational. To the average observer I would have appeared to fully understand that death was irreversible. I had authorized the autopsy. I had arranged for cremation. I had arranged for his ashes to be picked up and taken to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where, once Quintana was awake and well enough to be present, they would be placed in the chapel off the main altar where my brother and I had placed our mother's ashes. I had arranged for the marble plate on which her name was cut to be removed and recut to include John's name. Finally, on the 23rd of March, almost three months after his death, I had seen the ashes placed in the wall and the marble plate replaced and a service held We had Gregorian chant, for John, Quintana asked that the chant be in Latin. John too would have asked that We had a single soaring trumpet We had a Catholic priest and an Episcopal priest.