Joan Didion is a writer and thinker whose work has stayed with me. The Year of Magical Thinking was a book that made me cry, not only for Didion, but for myself. Because this is book of very personal feelings…the experience of being with a person one moment, then finding him dead the next. And yes, Joan Didion wrote about this in her skilled, beautiful way, she being the one to put into words what many of us have felt. Yet, Didion having the courage to set down her feelings, the horrendous experience of speaking to her husband on moment and then finding him dead the next.
Didion wrote: 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’t do that.
When he did not respond my first thought was that he had started to eat and chocked. 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 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 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 the numbers. A dispatcher asked if he was breathing. I said Just come.
Didion then relays the arrival of the ambulance and the procedures the team went through. They had set up a computer monitor on the floor and were watching it, but then in seconds made the decision to take her husband to the hospital. Though Didion wanted to go with them, she had to wait for a second ambulance to take her. She writes: “I have no memory of sirens. I have no memory of traffic. When we arrived a the emergency entrance…the gurney 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.
A TIME FOR HEALING
What does a woman who has watched, evaluated, then written about place, time, birth, life…what does she do when faced with death? Some time had to pass, but then Joan Didion wrote….
“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know 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 to 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 their husband is about to return and need his shoes.”
LIFE….REALITY
I cried when reading Didion’s book. I cried for my father, a man I barely knew. Because we all have lost someone. But have you ever thought of writing a memoir to honor that person?
I am no Joan Didion, but I wrote a memoir when my children were young. Searching that work I found the following…my way to cling to security, to do some MAGICAL THINKING…
My mother gives us a record with the story of the PIED PIPER of HAMLIN. I play this over and over. It is a strange story about a town infested with rats, about a piper who can rid the town of these pests. But then when he is not properly paid, he plays his pipe once more, coaxing the children to follow him out of the town, along winding roads and over hills to a long tunnel. It leads to a place where honey bees have lost their sting. This detail lingers with a very young me…but all of it…the tunnel, the honey bees that don’t sting. And I keep picturing all the children lined up in darkness before emerging into this place of light, this place of flowers and trees, warmth and sunshine…and those marvelous bees.
And sometimes when I lie awake and the hallway of my childhood is dark, I worry that I’ll hear that strange alluring music, that I will disappear into that tunnel. It is in the dark of my childhood bedroom that I discover how dry my lips can get, the existence of uneven spaces between my teeth, the clutching pain of stomach cramps before vomiting. It is in the darkness of that room that sheds on me the light of human discovery.
4 Responses
For sure my favorite writer of all.
Yes, Joan’s work highlighted the meaning life and adventure, of seeking knowledge and examining what she found.
This particular work helped me deal with the loss of my father so early in my life. It is amazing that an older woman
like me still can feel that pain. Thanks for your comment.
Her writing is great… and so is yours! Very evocative about that Pied Piper. The story could be construed as menacing, leading away all those children, but hopefully they were returned!
It is amazing how loss in early life can attach itself to so many things. I wrote a longer piece about dealing with my father’s death as it helps to sort things out. Thanks for being here, Beth