Joan Didion - The Year of Magical Thinking

Irealize as I write this that I do not want to finish this account.

Nor did I want to finish the year.

The craziness is receding but no clarity is taking its place.

I look for resolution and find none.

I did not want to finish the year because I know that as the days pass, as January becomes February and February becomes summer, certain things will happen. My image of John at the instant of his death will become less immediate, less raw. It will become something that happened in another year. My sense of John himself, John alive, will become more remote, even “mudgy,” softened, transmuted into whatever best serves my life without him. In fact this is already beginning to happen. All year I have been keeping time by last year’s calendar: what were we doing on this day last year, where did we have dinner, is it the day a year ago we flew to Honolulu after Quintana’s wedding, is it the day a year ago we flew back from Paris, is it the day. I realized today for the first time that my memory of this day a year ago is a memory that does not involve John. This day a year ago was December 31, 2003. John did not see this day a year ago. John was dead.

I was crossing Lexington Avenue when this occurred to me.

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.

I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.

Let them become the photograph on the table.

Let them become the name on the trust accounts.

Let go of them in the water.

Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of him in the water.

In fact the apprehension that our life together will decreasingly be the center of my every day seemed today on Lexington Avenue so distinct a betrayal that I lost all sense of oncoming traffic.

I think about leaving the lei at St. John the Divine.

A souvenir of the Christmas in Honolulu when we filled the screen with blue.

During the years when people still left Honolulu on the Matson Lines the custom at the moment of departure was to throw leis on the water, a promise that the traveler would return. The leis would get caught in the wake and go bruised and brown, the way the gardenias in the pool filter at the house in Brentwood Park had gone bruised and brown.

The other morning when I woke I tried to remember the arrangement of the rooms in the house in Brentwood Park. I imagined myself walking through the rooms, first on the ground floor and then on the second. Later in the day I realized that I had forgotten one.

The lei I left at St. John the Divine would have gone brown by now.

Leis go brown, tectonic plates shift, deep currents move, islands vanish, rooms get forgotten.

I flew into Indonesia and Malaysia and Singapore with John, in 1979 and 1980.

Some of the islands that were there then would now be gone, just shallows.

I think about swimming with him into the cave at Portuguese Bend, about the swell of clear water, the way it changed, the swiftness and power it gained as it narrowed through the rocks at the base of the point. The tide had to be just right. We had to be in the water at the very moment the tide was right. We could only have done this a half dozen times at most during the two years we lived there but it is what I remember. Each time we did it I was afraid of missing the swell, hanging back, timing it wrong. John never was. You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material.

Columbia University Press: Excerpt from “Re-Grief Therapy” by Dr. Volkan from Bereavement: Its Psychosocial Aspects, edited by Schoenberg, Gerber, Wiener, Kutscher, Peretz, and Carr. Copyright © 1975 by Columbia University Press. Reprinted by permission of Columbia University Press.

Harcourt, Inc. & Faber and Faber Ltd.: Excerpt from “East Coker” in Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot. Copyright © 1940 by T. S. Eliot and renewed 1968 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc. and Faber and Faber Ltd.

Eugene Kennedy: Excerpt from a letter written by Eugene Kennedy to Joan Didion. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Liveright Publishing Company: Excerpt from “Buffalo Bill’s.” Copyright 1923, 1951, © 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1976 by George James Firmage, from Complete Poems: 1904–1962 by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage. Reprinted by permission of Liveright Publishing Company.

Massachusetts Medical Society: Excerpt from “Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest — The Solution Is Shocking” by David J. Callans from The New England Journal of Medicine (August 12, 2004). Copyright © 2004 by Massachusetts Medical Society. Reprinted by permission of Massachusetts Medical Society.

Earl McGrath: Excerpt from a poem written by Earl McGrath. Reprinted by permission of the author.

New Directions Publishing Corp.: Excerpt from “Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day” by Delmore Schwartz from Selected Poems: Summer Knowledge. Copyright © 1959 by Delmore Schwartz. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

The New York Times Agency: Excerpt from “Death Comes Knocking” by Bob Herbert from The New York Times (November 12, 2004). Copyright © 2004 by The New York Times Co. Reprinted by permission of The New York Times Agency.

Oxford University Press: Excerpt from “Spring and Fall,” “Heaven-Haven,” “No Worst,” and “I Wake and Feel” by Gerard Manley Hopkins from The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 4th ed., edited by W. H. Gardner and N. H. MacKenzie (1970). Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Province of the Society of Jesus.

Random House, Inc.: Excerpt from “Funeral Blues,” copyright 1940 and renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.

Viking Penguin: Excerpt from “Self-Pity” by D. H. Lawrence from The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence by D. H. Lawrence, edited by V. de Sola Pinto & F. W. Roberts. Copyright © 1964, 1971 by Angelo Ravagli and C. M. Weekley, Executors of the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli. Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

JOAN DIDION

THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING

Joan Didion was born in California and lives in New York City. She is the author of five novels and seven previous books of nonfiction.