Joan Didion - The Year of Magical Thinking

I did not believe in the resurrection of the body.

Nor had Teresa Kean, Parlance, Emmett McClure, Jack Broderick, Maurice Dodd, the four people in the car, Charlie Buckles, Percy Darrow, or Walden McClure.

Nor had my Catholic husband.

I imagined this way of thinking to be clarifying, but in point of fact it was so muddled as to contradict even itself.

I did not believe in the resurrection of the body but I still believed that given the right circumstances he would come back.

He who left the faint traces before he died, the Number Three pencil.

One day it seemed important that I reread Alcestis. I had last read it at sixteen or seventeen, for a paper on Euripides, but recalled it as somehow relevant to this question of the “divide.” I remembered the Greeks in general but Alcestis in particular as good on the passage between life and death. They visualized it, they dramatized it, they made the dark water and the ferry into the mise-en-scène itself. I did reread Alcestis. What happens in the play is this: Admetus, the young king of Thessaly, has been condemned by Death to die. Apollo has interceded, gaining a promise from the Fates that Admetus, if he can find another mortal to die in his place, need not die immediately. Admetus approaches his friends and his parents, in vain. “I tell myself that we are a long time underground and that life is short, but sweet,” his father tells him after declining to take his place.

Only the wife of Admetus, the young queen, Alcestis, volunteers. There is much wailing about her approaching death, but no one steps in to save her. She dies, at length: “I see the two-oared boat, / I see the boat on the lake! / And Charon, / Ferryman of the Dead, / Calls to me, his hand on the oar…” Admetus is overcome by guilt and shame and self-pity: “Alas! How bitter to me is that ferrying of which you speak! O my unhappy one, how we suffer!” He behaves in every way badly. He blames his parents. He insists that Alcestis is suffering less than he. After some pages (and quite enough) of this, Alcestis, by means of a remarkably (even for 430 B.C.) clumsy deus ex machina, is allowed to come back. She does not speak, but this is explained, again clumsily, as temporary, self-correcting: “You may not hear her voice until she is purified from her consecration to the Lower Gods, and until the third dawn is risen.” If we rely on the text alone, the play ends happily.

This was not my memory of Alcestis, which suggests that I was already given, at sixteen or seventeen, to editing the text as I read it. The principal divergences between the text and my memory appear toward the end, when Alcestis returns from the dead. In my memory, the reason Alcestis does not speak is that she declines to speak. Admetus, as I remembered it, presses her, at which point, to his distress, since what she turns out to have on her mind are his revealed failings, she does speak. Admetus, alarmed, shuts off the prospect of hearing more by calling for celebration. Alcestis acquiesces, but remains remote, other. Alcestis is on the face of it back with her husband and children, again the young queen of Thessaly, but the ending (“my” ending) could not be construed as happy.

In some ways this is a better (more “worked out”) story, one that at least acknowledges that death “changes” the one who has died, but it opens up further questions about the divide. If the dead were truly to come back, what would they come back knowing? Could we face them? We who allowed them to die? The clear light of day tells me that I did not allow John to die, that I did not have that power, but do I believe that? Does he?

Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed.

They remember the tree that died, the gull that splattered onto the hood of the car.

They live by symbols. They read meaning into the barrage of spam on the unused computer, the delete key that stops working, the imagined abandonment in the decision to replace it. The voice on my answering machine is still John’s. The fact that it was his in the first place was arbitrary, having to do with who was around on the day the answering machine last needed programming, but if I needed to retape it now I would do so with a sense of betrayal. One day when I was talking on the telephone in his office I mindlessly turned the pages of the dictionary that he had always left open on the table by the desk. When I realized what I had done I was stricken: what word had he last looked up, what had he been thinking? By turning the pages had I lost the message? Or had the message been lost before I touched the dictionary? Had I refused to hear the message?

I tell you that I shall not live two days, Gawain said.

Later in the summer I received another book from Princeton. It was a first edition copy of True Confessions, in, as the booksellers say, “good condition, original dust jacket slightly frayed.” In fact it was John’s own copy: he had apparently sent it to a classmate who was organizing, for the fiftieth reunion of the Class of 1954, an exhibition of books written by class members. “It occupied the position of honor,” the classmate wrote to me, “since John was unquestionably the most distinguished writer in our class.”

I studied the original dust jacket, slightly frayed, on the copy of True Confessions.

I remembered the first time I saw this jacket, or a mock-up of this jacket. It had sat around our house for days, as proposed designs and type samples and jackets for new books always did, the idea being to gauge whether or not it would wear well, continue to please the eye.

I opened the book. I looked at the dedication. “For Dorothy Burns Dunne, Joan Didion, Quintana Roo Dunne,” the dedication read. “Generations.”

I had forgotten this dedication. I had not sufficiently appreciated it, a persistent theme by that stage of whatever I was going through.

Ireread True Confessions. I found it darker than I had remembered it. I reread Harp. I found a different, less sunny, version of the summer we watched Tenko and went to dinner at Morton’s.

Something else had happened toward the end of that summer.

In August there had been a memorial service for an acquaintance (this was not in itself the “something else” that happened), a French tennis player in his sixties who had been killed in an accident. The memorial service had been on someone’s court in Beverly Hills. “I met my wife at the service,” John had written in Harp, “coming directly from a doctor’s appointment in Santa Monica, and as I sat there under the hot August sun, death was very much on my mind. I thought Anton had actually died under the best possible circumstances for him, a moment of terror as he realized the inevitable outcome of the accident, then an instant later the eternal dark.”

The service ended and the parking attendant brought my car. As we drove away, my wife said, “What did the doctor say?”

There had not been an appropriate moment to mention my visit to the doctor in Santa Monica. “He scared the shit out of me, babe.”

“What did he say?”

“He said I was a candidate for a catastrophic cardiac event.”

A few pages further in Harp, the writer, John, examines the veracity of this (his own) account. He notes a name changed, a certain dramatic restructuring, a minor time collapse. He asks himself: “Anything else?” This was the answer he gave: “When I told my wife he scared the shit out of me, I started to cry.”

Either I had not remembered this or I had determinedly chosen not to remember this.

I had not sufficiently appreciated it.

Was that what he experienced as he himself died? “A moment of terror as he realized the inevitable outcome of the accident, then an instant later the eternal dark”? In the sense that it happens one night and not another, the mechanism of a typical cardiac arrest could be construed as essentially accidental: a sudden spasm ruptures a deposit of plaque in a coronary artery, ischemia follows, and the heart, deprived of oxygen, enters ventricular fibrillation.