Joan Didion - The Year of Magical Thinking

I remember that we all made soufflés. Conrad’s sister Nancy in Papeete had shown Katharine how to make them work without effort and Katharine showed me and Jean. The trick was a less strict approach than generally advised. Katharine also brought back Tahitian vanilla beans for us, thick sheaves tied with raffia.

We did crème caramel with the vanilla for a while but nobody liked to caramelize the sugar.

We talked about renting Lee Grant’s house above Zuma Beach and opening a restaurant, to be called “Lee Grant’s House.” Katharine and Jean and I would take turns cooking and John and Brian and Conrad would take turns running the front. This Malibu survivalist plan got abandoned because Katharine and Conrad separated and Brian was finishing a novel and John and I went to Honolulu to do a rewrite on a picture. We worked a lot in Honolulu. No one in New York could ever get the time difference straight so we could work all day without the phone ringing. There was a point in the 1970s when I wanted to buy a house there, and took John to look at many, but he seemed to interpret actually living in Honolulu as a less encouraging picture than staying at the Kahala.

Conrad Hall was now dead.

Brian Moore was now dead.

From an earlier house, a great wreck of a house on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood that we rented with its many bedrooms and its sun porches and its avocado trees and its overgrown clay tennis court for $450 a month, there was a framed verse that Earl McGrath had written on the occasion of our fifth anniversary:

This is the story of John Greg’ry Dunne

Who, with his wife Mrs. Didion Do,

Was legally married with family of one

And lived on Franklin Avenue.

Lived with their beautiful child Quintana

Also known as Didion D

Didion Dunne

And Didion Do.

And Quintana or Didion D.

A beautiful family of one Dunne Dunne Dunne

(I mean a family of three)

Living in a style best called erstwhile

On Franklin Avenue.

People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness. It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist’s office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off. These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible. I myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal. I seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead, entered a place in which I could be seen only by those who were themselves recently bereaved. I understood for the first time the power in the image of the rivers, the Styx, the Lethe, the cloaked ferryman with his pole. I understood for the first time the meaning in the practice of suttee. Widows did not throw themselves on the burning raft out of grief. The burning raft was instead an accurate representation of the place to which their grief (not their families, not the community, not custom, their grief ) had taken them. On the night John died we were thirty-one days short of our fortieth anniversary. You will have by now divined that the “hard sweet wisdom” in the last two lines of “Rose Aylmer” was lost on me.

I wanted more than a night of memories and sighs.

I wanted to scream.

I wanted him back.

Several years ago, walking east on Fifty-seventh Street between Sixth and Fifth Avenues on a bright fall day, I had what I believed at the time to be an apprehension of death. It was an effect of light: quick sunlight dappling, yellow leaves falling (but from what? were there even trees on West Fifty-seventh Street?), a shower of gold, spangled, very fast, a falling of the bright. Later I watched for this effect on similar bright days but never again experienced it. I wondered then if it had been a seizure, or stroke of some kind. A few years before that, in California, I had dreamed an image that, when I woke, I knew had been death: the image was that of an ice island, the jagged ridge seen from the air off one of the Channel Islands, except in this case all ice, translucent, a blued white, glittering in the sunlight. Unlike dreams in which the dreamer is anticipating death, inexorably sentenced to die but not yet there, there was in this dream no dread. Both the ice island and the fall of the bright on West Fifty-seventh Street seemed on the contrary transcendent, more beautiful than I could say, yet there was no doubt in my mind that what I had seen was death.

Why, if those were my images of death, did I remain so unable to accept the fact that he had died? Was it because I was failing to understand it as something that had happened to him? Was it because I was still understanding it as something that had happened to me?

Life changes fast.

Life changes in the instant.

You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

The question of self-pity.

You see how early the question of self-pity entered the picture.

One morning during the spring after it happened I picked up The New York Times and skipped directly from the front page to the crossword puzzle, a way of starting the day that had become during those months a pattern, the way I had come to read, or more to the point not to read, the paper. I had never before had the patience to work crossword puzzles, but now imagined that the practice would encourage a return to constructive cognitive engagement. The clue that first got my attention that morning was 6 Down, “Sometimes you feel like…” I instantly saw the obvious answer, a good long one that would fill many spaces and prove my competency for the day: “a motherless child.”

Motherless children have a real hard time—

Motherless children have such a real hard time—

No.

6 Down had only four letters.

I abandoned the puzzle (impatience died hard), and the next day looked up the answer. The correct answer for 6 Down was “anut.” “Anut?” A nut? Sometimes you feel like a nut ? How far had I absented myself from the world of normal response?

Notice: the answer most instantly accessed (“a motherless child”) was a wail of self-pity.

This was not going to be an easy failure of understanding to correct.

Avid its rush, that reeling blaze!

Where is my father and Eleanor?

Not where are they now, dead seven years,

But what they were then?

No more? No more?

— DELMORE SCHWARTZ,

“Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day”

He believed he was dying. He told me so, repeatedly. I dismissed this. He was depressed. He had finished a novel, Nothing Lost, which was caught in the predictable limbo of a prolonged period between delivery and publication, and he was undergoing an equally predictable crisis of confidence about the book he was then beginning, a reflection on the meaning of patriotism that had not yet found its momentum. He had been dealing as well through most of the year with a series of enervating medical issues. His cardiac rhythm had been slipping with increasing frequency into atrial fibrillation. A normal sinus rhythm could be restored by cardioversion, an outpatient procedure in which he was given general anesthesia for a few minutes while his heart was electrically shocked, but a change in physical status as slight as catching a cold or taking a long plane flight could again disrupt the rhythm. His last such procedure, in April 2003, had required not one but two shocks. The steadily increasing frequency with which cardioversion had become necessary indicated that it was no longer a useful option. In June, after a series of consultations, he had undergone a more radical cardiac intervention, a radio-frequency ablation of the atrial-ventricular node and the subsequent implantation of the Medtronic Kappa 900 SR pacemaker.