Joan Didion - The Year of Magical Thinking

In the same file drawer I found a few paragraphs John had written in 1990, on our twenty-sixth anniversary. “She wore sunglasses throughout the service the day we got married, at the little mission church in San Juan Bautista, California; she also wept through the entire ceremony. As we walked down the aisle, we promised each other that we could get out of this next week and not wait until death did us part.”

That worked too. Somehow it had all worked.

Why did I think that this improvisation could never end?

If I had seen that it could, what would I have done differently?

What would he?

Iam writing now as the end of the first year approaches. The sky in New York is dark when I wake at seven and darkening again by four in the afternoon. There are colored Christmas lights on the quince branches in the living room. There were also colored Christmas lights on quince branches in the living room a year ago, on the night it happened, but in the spring, not long after I brought Quintana home from UCLA, those strings burned out, went dead. This served as a symbol. I bought new strings of colored lights. This served as a profession of faith in the future. I take the opportunity for such professions where and when I can invent them, since I do not yet actually feel this faith in the future.

I notice that I have lost the skills for ordinary social encounters, however undeveloped those skills may have been, that I had a year ago. During the Republican convention I was invited to a small party at a friend’s apartment. I was happy to see the friend and I was happy to see her father, who was the reason for the party, but I found conversation with others difficult. I noticed as I was leaving that the Secret Service was there but lacked even the patience to stay long enough to learn what important person was coming. On another evening during the Republican convention I went to a party given by The New York Times in the Time Warner building. There were candles and gardenias floating in glass cubes. I could not focus on whoever I was talking to. I was focused only on the gardenias getting sucked into the filter at the house in Brentwood Park.

On such occasions I hear myself trying to make an effort and failing.

I notice that I get up from dinner too abruptly.

I also notice that I do not have the resilience I had a year ago. A certain number of crises occur and the mechanism that floods the situation with adrenaline burns out. Mobilization becomes unreliable, slow or absent. In August and September, after the Democratic and Republican conventions but before the election, I wrote, for the first time since John died, a piece. It was about the campaign. It was the first piece I had written since 1963 that he did not read in draft form and tell me what was wrong, what was needed, how to bring it up here, take it down there. I have never written pieces fluently but this one seemed to be taking even longer than usual: I realized at some point that I was unwilling to finish it, because there was no one to read it. I kept telling myself that I had a deadline, that John and I never missed deadlines. Whatever I finally did to finish this piece was as close as I have ever come to imagining a message from him. The message was simple: You’re a professional. Finish the piece.

It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.

The trach at UCLA, I recognize now, was going to happen with or without me.

Quintana resuming her life, I recognize now, was going to happen with or without me.

Finishing this piece, which was to say resuming my own life, was not.

When I checked the piece for publication I was startled and unsettled by how many mistakes I had made: simple errors of transcription, names and dates wrong. I told myself that this was temporary, part of the mobilization problem, further evidence of those cognitive deficits that came with either stress or grief, but I remained unsettled. Would I ever be right again? Could I ever again trust myself not to be wrong?

Do you always have to be right? He had said that.

Is it impossible for you to consider the possibility that you might be wrong?

Increasingly I find myself focusing on the similarities between these December days and the same December days a year ago. In certain ways those similar days a year ago have more clarity for me, a sharper focus. I do many of the same things. I make the same lists of things undone. I wrap Christmas presents in the same colored tissue, write the same messages on the same postcards from the Whitney gift shop, affix the postcards to the colored tissue with the same gold notary seals. I write the same checks for the building staff, except the checks are now imprinted with only my name. I would not have changed the checks (any more than I would change the voice on the answering machine) but it was said to be essential that John’s name now appear only on trust accounts. I order the same kind of ham from Citarella. I fret the same way over the number of plates I will need on Christmas Eve, count and recount. I keep an annual December dentist’s appointment and realize as I am putting the sample toothbrushes into my bag that no one will be waiting for me in the reception room, reading the papers until we can go to breakfast at 3 Guys on Madison Avenue. The morning goes empty. When I pass 3 Guys I look the other way. A friend asks me to go with her to hear the Christmas music at St. Ignatius Loyola, and we walk home in the dark in the rain. That night the first snow falls, although only a dusting, no avalanching off the roof of St. James’, nothing like my birthday a year ago.

My birthday a year ago when he gave me the last present he would ever give me.

My birthday a year ago when he had twenty-five nights left to live.

On the table in front of the fireplace I notice something out of place in the stack of books nearest the chair in which John sat to read when he woke in the middle of the night. I have deliberately left this stack untouched, not from any shrine-building impulse but because I did not believe that I could afford to think about what he read in the middle of the night. Now someone has placed on top of the stack, balanced precariously, a large illustrated coffee-table book, The Agnelli Gardens at Villar Perosa. I move The Agnelli Gardens at Villar Perosa. Beneath it is a heavily marked copy of John Lukacs’s Five Days in London: May 1940, in which there is a laminated bookmark that reads, in a child’s handwriting, John — happy reading to you — from John, age 7. I am at first puzzled by the bookmark, which under the lamination is dusted with festive pink glitter, then remember: the Creative Artists Agency, as a Christmas project every year, “adopts” a group of Los Angeles schoolchildren, each of whom in turn makes a keepsake for a designated CAA client.

He would have opened the box from CAA on Christmas night.

He would have stuck the bookmark in whatever book was on top of that stack.

He would have had one hundred and twenty hours left to live.

How would he have chosen to live those one hundred and twenty hours?

Beneath the copy of Five Days in London is a copy of The New Yorker dated January 5, 2004. A copy of The New Yorker with that issue date would have been delivered to our apartment on Sunday, December 28, 2003. On Sunday, December 28, 2003, according to John’s calendar, we had dinner at home with Sharon DeLano, who had been his editor at Random House and was at that time his editor at The New Yorker. We would have had dinner at the table in the living room. According to my kitchen notebook we ate linguine Bolognese and a salad and cheese and a baguette. At that point he would have had forty-eight hours left to live.