I needed to be alone so that he could come back.

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
Published in 2005

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary

This is the story of Joan and John
and Quintana, their only child.

We start at the end; John has died,
Joan is left to deal.
Quintana, just married, is ill herself,
In the ICU trying to heal.

We follow Joan as she lives the year,
Trying to sort herself out.
Quintana gets better, then worse,
Then better, fighting bout after bout.

Joan thinks that maybe John will come back,
Perhaps dying is not fully real.
She writes and thinks and waits and hurts,
Grieving, not wanting to feel.

In the end, it's Joan, on her own, alone,
Muddling her lone way through.
Quintana is healthy for a time, not long,
The family of many now few.

Spoiler Over: Continue Here

Dear blobbists, 

I finished this book rather quickly, but I needed some time to sit with it before I could blob about it. It was dark, but it wasn't so much the darkness that stayed me, but the contemplative nature of the writing. If I had to say which books this reminded me of most, I think I would say The Tale of Genji or The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. There's something very dreamlike about the writing, and it feels almost painfully honest. 

Without further ado, I'll share my thoughts. 

Writing to find meaning
I found it fascinating that Joan was using this work to explore her own grief, and it felt beautifully intimate in that sense. Here are two lines I liked that illustrate this: 

The way I write is who I am, or have become. This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning.

Who is the director of dreams, would he care? Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

Grief, unexpected
I have experienced some grief in my life, but the most recent, and in some ways most immediate, loss that I underwent was the recent passing of my dear cat, Susan. Those of you who follow my blob regularly know that she meant a very great deal to me, and we had almost eleven excellent years together. Still, I found that her death came with many surprises. 

This line - Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it - felt very apt to me. I found myself wanting her ashes, wanting an urn, wanting to make a shrine, all things I had not imagined I would want. I did not know how I would want to grieve her until the time came. 

And this line - Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone - struck me, too. I felt particularly alone after Susan died because I was the only one for whom the loss was so total. She lived with me, and it was just we two, and so for no one else was the loss so apparent, so continuous, so ever present. I can only imagine the multiplication of this pain if this loss were a partner, a lover, a creative collaborator, and a best friend, all of which were true for Joan and John. 

Drawing the circle
Joan sets the scene for us the day her husband dies. She and he were returning from the ICU where they were visiting Quintana, their daughter, and they were back in their pleasant New York apartment. I love this line about a fire in the fireplace: 

Fires said we were home, we had drawn the circle, we were safe through the night.

It seems so poignant because of course this fire does not keep them safe through the night. It is true, though, that we create auras of coziness and warmth and we do feel a certain protection from them, but they cannot keep death from our door. 

They know before we do
As Joan explores the last weeks of her husband's life, looking back in retrospect during the year that comes after, she realizes that he seems to have known his own death was in store. She thinks of this line: 

Only the dying man can tell you how much time he has left. Chanson de Roland

and realizes that there were small clues, small moments, in which he seemed to suggest that he knew his time was almost up. Susan was sick with something - what exactly is still a bit unclear - but she lost a lot of weight, and then in the end, she stopped eating and drinking. On the last day, the day I was to take her to the vet to have her put to sleep, we laid in my bed for hours, and she slept right on my chest, over my heart, something she had never done before. I don't know what I believe in as far as spirituality is concerned, but I know in my heart that she knew this was the end. I believe that she told me when it was time. 

Later, Joan sees things that John left - notes and messages, and wonders to herself - When did he begin seeing himself as dead?

Magical thinking
Admittedly, I knew nothing about this book before I read it (because, as you know, readers, I do not like to be told what a book is about or what I will think of it before I read it) but this meant that I mistakenly thought it was about magic, when it reality, the "magical thinking" was really more like wishful thinking. Here are some examples of this: 

After John's death in NY - I found myself wondering, with no sense of illogic, if it had also happened in Los Angeles.

On wanting people to leave her alone - I needed to be alone so that he could come back.

On buying scrubs at the hospital store when Quintana is in the ICU again in CA - So profound was the isolation in which I was then operating that it did not immediately occur to me that for the mother of a patient to show up at the hospital wearing blue cotton scrubs could only be viewed as a suspicious violation of boundaries.

Death and dying
Joan explores many fictional representations of death throughout the book, looking for meaning or moments of resonance. I liked this particular thought, which is in reference to the story of Alcestis, the mythical queen of Thessaly, wife of King Admetus: 

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? 

Admittedly, the rhymer in me wants that last line to read "but does he believe that? Do I?"

Death, a disaster to be averted
I read a book recently called God is Red: A Native View of Religion by Vine Deloria, Jr., and there were many interesting things in it, but perhaps the one that stuck out to me most is the idea that in western culture, death is some sort of villain or enemy or trap, that if we're just careful enough, we can evade, whereas in the tribal culture, death is a natural component of the life cycle, and while losses are mourned, they are also expected. This line of Joan's reminded me of that: 

How open we are to the persistent message that we can avert death. And to its punitive correlative, the message that if death catches us we have only ourselves to blame.

Referents and reverberations
In another amusing twist, one of the authors Joan looks to is D.H. Lawrence, who is the author of the next book on my list. This is the line she references: 

D.H. Lawrence - I never saw a wild thing/ sorry for itself

Lines I Liked:

• We are not idealized wild things. We are imperfect mortal beings. 

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

• On the peacocks near one of their homes - At dusk they would scream and try to fly to their nests in the olive trees, a fraught moment because they would so often fall.

New to me:

jacaranda tree - a sub-tropical tree native to south-central South America that has been widely planted elsewhere because of its attractive and long-lasting pale indigo flowers. 

Well, dear readers, that is all I have to say today. I have a new adorable feline friend - Twix is her name and playing is her game. She knows she is not to replace Susan in this household, but to join the cat energy of our home, and I think Susan would be amused by her vim and vigor. 

If you have lost someone or some thing, I hope that this post made you feel a bit less alone. If not, I hope we didn't bring your mood down too much for this beautiful Sunday. 

Sending love, hope, and hugs your way, today and all days! Keep safe, keep faith, good night.