![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/the_year_of_magical_thinking.large_.jpg\" "\\"the_year_of_magical_thinking.large\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\nStill on the essays shelf<\/a>. The Year of Magical Thinking<\/a> Joan Didion had spent almost 40 years in her own unique position in American letters. She was not defined by a genre. She did it all. She wrote novels, essays, journalistic pieces, screenplays. Her work encompassed history and personal memoir, sometimes in the same piece. Her writing is cool, clear, and sometimes a little bit frightening, in its ruthless refusal to accept cliches or handed-down ideas. She examined everything<\/i> and took nothing<\/i> at face value. An exhausting way to be, certainly, but Didion came by it honestly. <\/p>\n So when her husband, John Dunne, died suddenly of a massive coronary in 2003, after 40 years of marriage, the first thing she wrote, a couple days later, was: <\/p>\n Life changes fast. And that was it for a long time. She couldn’t write. How could she write about what had just happened? The loss of her partner? <\/p>\n Death is the most common of occurrences, we all do it, and we all watch our loved ones do it, but that doesn’t take away its horrifying uniqueness to those who experience it. My friend Alex called me the night my father died. It was a freezing January night and I stood out in the driveway talking to her. She was phenomenal. Both of her parents are now gone. I said something like, “Well, you know, you’ve been through it -” and she cut me off. “Listen, Sheila, as far as you’re concerned, your father’s death is the first death that has ever occurred. This is the only death that has ever happened. Nobody can tell you how to go through it, nobody can give you advice. This death is YOURS.” It was an incredible thing to hear, especially in the immediate wake of the loss. I would learn later that people like to be experts in things, they give you unsolicited advice, they say, “Oh, I know just how you feel. My aunt who I loved died last year.” Well, no, it’s not the same thing. No death is the same. Even the death of a parent … cannot be compared to anyone else’s experience. Because the relationships are different. I have friends who lost parents and were already so estranged from said parent that yes, they had a moment of, “Wow. He’s dead. How do I feel about that? Wow.” but they didn’t have a relationship with the parent during life, so the experience of death was not identical to mine. I came to love and appreciate those who refused to make comparisons. Who didn’t lump “my” death in with something they had experienced. “I know just what you’re feeling. I felt that way when my grandmother died,” well-meaning people would say. I couldn’t help it, I would bristle at those comments. It seemed to take away from the sheer uniqueness of my own loss, its particular qualities, and I resented having it lumped in with every other death. Oh, how I loved the people who were brave enough to go with the cliches. Oh, how I loved people who knew that the words, “So sorry for your loss” were invented for a reason. If I have any advice of “what to say” to someone who has experienced a tremendous loss, I would say: “Try not to SAY anything. If you’re a good friend, then LISTEN. And if the person doesn’t want to talk about it, then don’t talk about it. But, in general, don’t SAY anything. If you must say something, then limit it to ‘So sorry for your loss’ or ‘My condolences’ or ‘Your family is in my thoughts and prayers.’ That is perfectly sufficient.” Look out for the people who avoid cliches in times of great trauma. They don’t know how to live. This poor woman told me that she hoped my father was “dancing with the angels”, and she meant well, but the image of my cranky non-church-going father “dancing with the angels” was so off-putting (you didn’t KNOW him, don’t talk about what you don’t KNOW) that I could barely come up with a response. Again, blah blah, she means well, but lots of people do harm while meaning well. <\/p>\n The thing that nobody can prepare you for with grief is how time itself changes. That was the most disorienting thing. It took me months to acclimate to it. Months flew by, and yet my experience of said months was that I was stalled in the water, halfway submerged. And since I wasn’t prepared for it I didn’t know how to handle it. Another thing that nobody really prepared me for was what grief did to my concentration. I wrote about it a little bit here<\/a>. Reading and watching movies is how I spend my free time. Being unable to read was one of the most upsetting byproducts of grief because all avenues of consolation were then closed to me. When I am upset, I lose myself in a book or a movie. I couldn’t do that in the year my father died. I was reading a huge biography of Nureyev, and it was very well-written, but I was unable to retain what I had read. I would manage 3 or 4 pages, and the next day whatever I had read had vanished from my mind. It was a slog. Movies were no better. I was in a fog. I went back to work soon after the funeral. It was completely disorienting. It solidified my firm belief that wearing black arm-bands should come back into vogue. Not for the person grieving, but for those who encounter that person. The black arm-band says, “I am in the first year of this. This is what I am dealing with.” So other people can act accordingly. We do not give room in our society for death and grief. Being expected to be 100% a week after you’ve lost a parent is inhuman. I wondered if I would ever be able to read again. I had expected to be sad. But, strangely enough, the sadness came later. It was not an immediate reaction. My father had been sick for so long, and I had done so much anticipatory weeping that once he passed, I felt mostly relief that he was no longer in pain. I didn’t cry at all those first couple of months, and was just totally amazed by that. I had been so afraid<\/i> of what it would be like without him here. Terrified. (And I was right to be terrified. It still sucks, and in many ways now it is worse, rather than better. Time heals all wounds? What moron said that?) My cousin Mike, knowing of my distress in being unable to read or watch movies (or write), gave me an assignment one freezing night<\/a>. It was a writing assignment. I “said Yes” and wrote a scene that night in 3 hours. It came out of me in one draft. (Incidentally, that was the beginning of the play that has since taken over my life, got me the attention of Broadway producers, and got me a swanky agent. THAT was the start of it. And that scene I wrote that night, on command, has remained mainly unchanged in the final version. I had futzed with it once I wrote the rest of the play, ruining it, and finally was encouraged to go back to that first draft. I wrote about all of that here<\/a>.) That was the beginning of me, at least, being able to write again. And it was something new. It wasn’t my site. It wasn’t my diary. It was completely fictional, and it was a script – something I had no experience in (except on the acting side). 2009 was the year where the thing took shape, and by October of that year, we had our first reading<\/a> of two of the scenes in New York. I got busy. But I was not fully “normal” until almost a year later, at least in terms of being able to be back to myself, and do the things I like to do. My concentration was not fully 100% until much later, and my solitary isolated month out on Block Island in January 2010<\/a> was really about that. That was a healing month. I read like a fiend. I wrote like a fiend. I watched 4 or 5 movies a day. I was ready. Life beckoned. <\/p>\n I had read Joan Didion’s grief memoir The Year of Magical Thinking<\/i> in 2005. My father wasn’t sick yet. I had had a lot of experience with death as a child, three uncles died, and two grandfathers in a 5 year period. These were people I loved. I am not a stranger to death. But losing my father was a whole new universe. Nothing would be the same again. I don’t think I quite understood Didion’s point about “magical thinking”, and even now I am not sure I do, although all you need to do is read her evocation of what it felt like<\/i> and you can get a glimmer. It certainly opens you up to empathy for the depth of the loss someone experiences, and also how LONG grief goes on. When one thinks of grief, you think of tears and sobbing. But grief goes much deeper than that. Didion breaks it down. She could sense it early on, there’s that one line she wrote in that first snippet: “The question of self-pity.” Even in the first throes of loss, she was aware of the tendency towards self-pity. She goes into that in great detail in the book. She describes one of the effects of grief as being “the vortex”. Certain places, intersections, landscapes would tailspin her into the vortex: Here is where they bought coffee, this was the road I drove on when we lived in this area, here is the corner where such-and-such happened. Didion began to actively avoid the places that would bring on the vortex. The “magical thinking” part of it has to do with the baffled sense of how unreal life is without her husband. She can’t get rid of his clothes. She pores over the doorman’s log of the night he died, so she can see the entry about the ambulance arriving. She thinks maybe she could turn back time. How long did it take the ambulance to get there? If it had been 5 minutes sooner … would he still be here? He was here, and now he’s gone. A wrenching separation, which left her breathless, disoriented, and obsessive. <\/p>\n To add to the trauma, their 38 year old daughter Quintana had been hospitalized about a week before Didion’s husband died. So in the week leading up to his death, all normal routines had ceased, and they spent their time going to and from the ICU where Quintana lay in a near-coma. Nobody could figure out what was wrong with her. She was in her 30s. She had just gotten married (earlier that year, I believe). At first it was thought she had a bad flu. Dehydrated? So Quintana was not aware when her father passed, and along with dealing with her very sick daughter (Quintana eventually died), Didion had to plan her husband’s funeral, and go through it by herself. In a normal time, Quintana would have been by her side, sharing her grief. Didion was denied that. “The question of self-pity.” You certainly couldn’t blame Didion for indulging in some self-pity, but as I know well self-pity is often the harbinger of something much deeper, a self-hatred, a selfishness, a refusal to deal with actual events as they unfold, a refusal to give up your own morbid narrative of yourself. (“Oh, see, this always happens to me.” etc.) That is another thing about grief. You are so blasted open by the loss that EVERYTHING happens to you. You go through EVERYTHING and your normal defenses are shot to shit. So, analytically, you can say, “Nope. That’s self-pitying, don’t go down that path” but your entire cellular structure is pouring in that direction and it can’t be stopped. I would say that another thing you could SAY to someone dealing with a loss (if you feel you must say something, and again, I recommend sticking with “Sorry for your loss” unless you are a very close friend), is: “Nothing you experience is wrong. You might have a good day and feel happy. That’s not wrong. You may bemoan your fate the next day. That’s not wrong. Everything you go through is right right now.”<\/p>\n So it is difficult to imagine the trauma of having a mysteriously sick adult daughter, have your husband die in the beginning of the illness, have to continue to minister to your mysteriously sick adult daughter for a year, a year, and then to have your daughter die. I mean, how is one to process any of that? This is what life handed Joan Didion. And so she did the only thing she could possibly do, which was write about it. John Gregory Dunne died in December of 2003. Didoin started writing The Year of Magical Thinking<\/i> in October of 2004 and finished it in two and a half months. It came out and was a smash hit. Didion threw herself into a book tour, and also almost immediately began adapting it into a play (which ended up on Broadway, starring Vanessa Redgrave). Quintana died in August of 2005, during Didion’s promotional tour for the Broadway production. The mind just stands totally still trying to contemplate dealing with all of that. <\/p>\n Quintana’s death is not mentioned in The Year of Magical Thinking<\/i> (of course not, because Quintana was still alive when Didion completed it). But Didion did not add a coda, or an epilogue, to “update” the story. She remained ruthless in her desire to express what life had been like for her during “the year of magical thinking”, and one can only imagine the courage it took to put it all down. <\/p>\n It is an extraordinary document and was quite helpful for me when I was going through my own trauma. I did not read it again, but I referenced it often in my mind. I would find myself floundering through the pages of the Nureyev biography and think, “Didion warned me of this.” I would feel a blast of arctic pain when I would hear certain songs, and remember Didion’s vortex. So no, nobody can prepare you for what true grief feels like, but Didion’s memoir is an excellent guide. As always, her prose is chilly and filled with suffering, suffering so acute that it barely reaches the surface. She keeps her eye on the ball, as difficult as that must have been (or who knows, maybe it was easy, she wrote the entire thing in 88 days). She keeps lists, she goes over the lists, she obsessively tells us her lists, she talks about the vortex, she talks about going to visit Quintana, now alone, now without her partner beside her. She gives us the details, the sensoral details of all of this, because so much of life is experienced through the senses. And when you are traumatized, sometimes it is ONLY the senses that make any impression at all. The brain and heart are otherwise occupied. They have shriveled up behind their armor, knowing that the psyche is wounded, knowing that the “host” needs protection. <\/p>\n Didion is a marvel. Her work has always meant so much to me, and The Year of Magical Thinking<\/i> is a breathtaking accomplishment. It can help a lot of people. I would never have characterized Didion’s work as “helpful” before, at least not in that way. She’s not a do-gooder. And, in some respects, the keening wail of depression that vibrates through most of her prose is something I often can’t handle, since I have such a keening wail myself and I need to be careful of what I expose myself to. I am often not strong enough to handle Didion. I am grateful that she had the courage and the talent to write it all down, because I can visit Didion Land any time I want to, but I do need to be careful. She can crack me open like a walnut. But to anyone experiencing a loss, and anyone baffled at some of the byproducts of grief (how weird time is, how your concentration alters, how underwater you feel) … The Year of Magical Thinking<\/i> is a fantastic guide.<\/p>\n Here is an excerpt. In the first months following his death, Didion became convinced that he was coming back. So she needed to be ready for him, keep the apartment ready, keep his things ready. This was totally real to her. It reminds me of Meryl Streep’s performance as Margaret Thatcher<\/a>. The film was not perfect, but one thing it did, and it did brilliantly, was to show, in an unblinking fashion, the loss of power when one ages, and also the tremendous disorientation that goes hand in hand with vast grief.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=thesheivari-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1400078431\")
\nLife changes in the instant.
\nYou sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
\nThe question of self-pity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n