Joan Didion captures the rage felt by those who mourn

 

Blue Nights – Joan Didion (2011)

            About two and a half years ago, thanks to the repeated insistence of my beautiful wife Elizabeth, I absorbed Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking,” in which she explored the state of her mind reeling from the sudden passing of her husband.  It was as honest and profound an examination of the experience of Loss as I have ever come across.  About seven months after I completed that book, my own mother passed away, over a quarter century after my father left us.  She never stopped mourning my father’s death in her heart, and she remained devoted to him through all things. 

The loss of a partner, which both Joan Didion and my mother experienced, is more of a shock than the loss of one’s parent.  We are supposed to outlive our mom and dad, but our life-partner is supposed to be there with us forever.  The idea of losing a child? Incomprehensible to most parents.  My mother’s mom saw three of her children pass away before her.  Joan Didion lost her adopted daughter soon after losing her husband.  While “The Year of Magical Thinking” details the loss of mental focus and the intensity of memory and grief, “Blue Nights” rages at the loss of her daughter.  My mother once said the worst thing in the world is for a parent to lose a child.  Her own mother, herself a widow, told her this.  I cannot imagine a more true statement.

This is not a grief-stricken book.  It is an anger-filled self-examination.  Joan Didion may be a petite, refined woman, but her heart and mind are of a different type.  She uses her mind as if her life depended on unflinching honesty and truth, which is similar to the many of us who live in mourning or grief every day.  She asks herself questions which, I would imagine, almost all mothers ask themselves but which most mothers would never admit publicly.  Joan does not always have answers.  That is a truth of life.  We all have more questions than we can answer.

Early on in the book, Ms. Didion describes the process by which her and her husband adopted their daughter Quintana.  To them, it was magic.  After communicating their desire to adopt to friends and family, they received a phone call from a Doctor acquaintance stating that there was a beautiful baby girl needing a home.  Joan describes the joy they felt answering the call, shouting in glee, heading over to the hospital to meet their new daughter, waiting to take her home, and then, 6 months later, officially adopting her.  Joan then tells of how this dream of a story was taken by their adoptive daughter. She would ask her parents to please retell the story, the wonderful story of her adoption.  However, for Quintana, this story brought forth questions her mom found unsettling in hindsight.  Quintana would listen to the story.  She would then ask her parents questions such as, “What if you had not been home when the Doctor called?”, “What if you had a car accident on the way to the Hospital?”, or “What if you had seen me and not loved me?”  These questions, which can break a parent’s heart, shed light on an issue many adoptive children have, which can be framed thus, “If my birth parents abandoned me, then how do I know my adoptive parents will not do the same?”  Brutal.  Some questions and ideas are too much for a young developing mind.

As she writes, Joan Didion examines what she felt were the blind spots in her caring for her daughter, for all parents of sick children ask themselves such questions.  What did I miss?  What was my child trying to tell me?  Did my actions make her life worse?  Was she happy?  For Joan Didion, these are not easy questions to ask nor answer.  Quintana had many health issues in life, but she was a strong soul, eventually marrying the love of her life.  The anger Joan Didion feels, which is reflected in her writing, is the rage all those of us who experience profound loss and feel helpless inside.   

People assume grief is about sadness.  It can equally be about rage.  Pure, unadulterated rage at the world, its inhabitants, its rules, and whoever the hell created it all.  Joan mentioned a comment directed at her by caring friends and family in the weeks following her daughter’s death.  “At least you have your memories.”  It sounds nice enough, but only someone who has never experienced true loss and grief would imagine it to be so.  I, like Joan, know the actual truth.  The memories are what HURTS.  The memories are what bring back the loss and the pain and the sorrow like it was yesterday, for in our minds and hearts, it was just yesterday.  The memories are what stops you from living your day-to-day life.  It can be something as inconsequential as a whiff of perfume, or the sight of a specific flower, or running across an item loved by those you lost.  Joan describes this and it is just so very true.  There are no “happy” memories.  There are just memories, reminders that someone who once existed, and who once meant everything to you, is now gone, and we are left behind to pick up the pieces and move on. 

Joan details how, having lost her husband and daughter, her deepest remaining fear is not the end of her own life, but the knowledge that when she dies her memories of Quintana will die with her.  As she states at the end of this book, “The fear is for what is still to be lost / you may see nothing still to be lost / yet, there is no day in her life in which I do not see her.” Some say that we are not truly dead until the last person that remembers us has passed.  Joan Didion understands that burden completely.

(This book can be purchased here: https://www.thejoandidion.com/blue-nights )

Loss, and the Grief that follows, has never been more honestly explored.

The Year of Magical Thinking – Joan Didion (2005)

On the 10^th of February, 1991, my father slipped from life after a long, debilitating illness.  My brother and I were at school, my mother was at work, and my grandma was at home with my dad.  We knew it was coming.  We had reached a point where we just didn’t want my father to suffer anymore.  He had been unable to speak for months, the cancer having dwindled his once robust body to a thin wisp.  He was barely 70 lbs.  He was 46 years old.

On the 30^th of December, 2003, the author Joan Didion was settling down to dinner with her husband, having returned from a visit to the ICU where their daughter was currently under examination, when her husband stopped talking and slumped forward onto the table.  The paramedics were called but he was pronounced DOA at the hospital.  Joan’s husband John, a fellow author, was also 46 years old.

Losing a loved one over a period of months or years is its own kind of torture.  The living must come to grips with the inescapable fact that death is coming for someone they care about.  The grief hits way before death.  It hits when you no longer recognize your father in front of you.  It comes when you sit and think, “I am going to have to grow up all by myself, now.”  It struck when I realized my mother had to come to her own realization that she would continue living, while the person she had known since childhood, and married at age 21, and lived and loved and fought with and raised children with for decades would sooner or later be gone.

Joan Didion experienced a wholly different grief.  She had to suffer the grief of the unexpected departure.  Her husband died right in front of her.  Her daughter was under intensive care at a hospital.  She was alone.  She had to continue on alone.  This book, The Year of Magical Thinking, is a deeply personal exploration of a mind under the most acute grief.  As a writer, she is concerned with how thoughts form, why ideas are created, why thoughts occur.  In this book, she details her experiences not only with the nuts and bolts of what happens once someone in your house dies, but also the deep schism that occurs in the mind of the grieving survivors. 

Joan Didion suffered much differently than my family did when we lost our father.  With our dad’s passing, there were few questions such as the ones Ms. Didion asks herself.  She repeatedly agonizes over whether there were something she could have foreseen, something she could have changed, or some action she could have taken that would have altered the oncoming cardiac arrest that took her husband.  She pores over the medical literature to try and make sense of what had happened.  Endless questions and regrets and what-if’s flit through her mind, but she comes to understand that it is the state of grief itself that is keeping her conscious thought from behaving in the rigorous, writer-worthy intricacies she is used to.  It is this state that she describes so well, and which is applicable to anyone and everyone suffering through the loss of a loved one.

I cannot imagine what losing my father would have been like had we to deal with what Joan Didion had to.  Their daughter was chronically ill, in and out of ICU’s and specialist clinics.  Joan’s experience with her daughter (who passed soon after the publication of this book) is perhaps closer to our experience losing our dad.  I cannot imagine how Joan Didion managed to survive this grief.  I can barely imagine how my mom survived losing her best friend, my father, and she had two healthy children. 

Joan Didion has done a great service to people who are suffering from loss, or who know it is on its way.   As she describes in the book, Grief is a state of mental instability.  It is an imbalance.  The “year of magical thinking” she used as the title for this book is something may trauma survivors deal with.  In Ms. Didion’s case, the magical thinking consisted of believing that if she just kept his clothes clean, if she kept her husband’s library exactly as it was when he died, if she just continued on, her husband would come back.  She describes the shock her system received when the hospital called asking her if she was willing to donate her husband’s body to science.  “If I do so, he will not come back.”  Joan knew these were deluded thoughts.  She could not will her mind to think rigorously. 

As she stated in the book, Mourning happens after Grief.  Grief is inconsolable, irrational, and erases all other hope and desire.  Some people grieve forever.  Some grieve so hard they end up dying from a lack of desire to live.  Other people work so hard at hiding their Grief that they end up doing irreparable damage to their own psyche.  It took over a year for Joan to begin to actually Mourn.  It took me far longer than that, as I distracted myself with starting college.

I want to thank my lovely wife Elizabeth Saenz for this recommendation.  I gifted this book, and the companion piece, “Blue Nights”, about the life and death of their daughter Quintana a couple of Christmases ago to her.  As the 28 anniversary of my father’s death came and went this year, with its typical onset of melancholy and sadness, she told me it was time for me to read “The Year of Magical Thinking.”  As always, she was correct.  Death is but the opposite of Life.  We will all suffer the loss of someone close to us.  We will all need to grieve and mourn at some point in our life.  This self-exploration of the grieving mind is an invaluable resource.  I think it would help many grieving people to understand that what they experienced was normal.  They need to know that we all suffer this way.  We all lose our minds in grief, whether Death took our loved one quickly, or over a prolonged period of suffering. 

The hardest part of grief is the awareness that all the while, the world moves on, uncaring, and unconcerned about your loss.  Businesses must run, schools must start, and people must go on about their lives.  As we walk through our lives, we never know which co-worker, fellow shopper, or neighbor is in a state of acute Grief, but is sleep-walking through their life in the only way they know how.  It pays to be mindful of this.  In the wise words of Kurt Vonnegut, “We are all here to help each other get through this, whatever ‘this’ is.”

(This book can be purchased here: THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING )