Of Fear and Tragical Inkling...

I have just finished reading Joan Didion’s memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking.
I think the thing is a beaut.
For those who may not be familiar with Joan Didion [as I also was not], she is a California-born novelist/journalist/essayist, now living in New York.
The “Year” in the title refers to the time frame between late December, 2003 and New Year’s Eve 2004. And the “Magical Thinking” well, that is the way in which the author found herself reacting to the tragic events of that year.
In a sense, the term could mean “disbelief.”

First, Joan’s daughter Quintana falls gravely ill, just before Christmas of 2003. She is placed on life-support. On Dec.30th, Joan and her husband of forty years, John Gregory Dunne, (himself a writer) return from the hospital and sit down to dinner.
Suddenly, almost in mid-sentence, John is not only dying, but dead.
No amount of foreknowledge [John has a pacemaker installed in his chest, and a lengthy history of heart problems] could have prepared Joan Didion for the disorientation that was to characterize her life from this point onward.
As she put it, she would come to know all about “the shallowness of sanity.”
Four weeks later, Quintana makes a recovery, and is released from hospital. The funeral for her father John, which has been put off till now, takes place. And the very next day….. no, I will not tell you what happens the very next day… you will simply have to read the book to find out.
But what happens is tragic, and mind-numbingly agonizing to even read, much less fathom that the author lived it.
You may ask, “Why should we read such stuff, then?”
My answer would be, “Because!”
It is life. This stuff is what life is all about.

Even in its brightest moments, [all of which would be found in its many digressions and recollections] I would not describe this book as an uplifting read, but at the same time, it is far from defeatist, in tone. There is nothing “let’s-just-lay-down-and-die-then” about it! And that’s what makes it such an important book, I think.
We see a woman’s profound love for husband and daughter and self. We see her desire for the family to be whole. And we see all of these things rubbed raw. Rubbed out, even. Threatened and challenged. We see her surviving.
We see the fear of going on, alone.
We see the guilt that wracks her as she imagines there may have been things she could have done to prevent certain events. We see her sort of mystically obsessed about whether her husband may have subconsciously known that he would die when he did. Did he have the tragical inkling?
She repeats to herself a refrain attributed to the Chanson de Roland, where Gawain says, “I tell you that I shall not live two days.”
Gawain ended up being right. Did her husband also know the time of his own passing on?
This sets off in her an obsession with the intricate details surrounding his death, and it is an entire year that passes [The Year of Magical Thinking] before she realizes she is trying to find out the impossible.
It is a very well-crafted book. Having said that, is it something to give someone in order to help them through their own time of grieving?
I think not. Perhaps it could be, but I think it is written in such a cathartic fashion that “helping someone else out” was not really the modus operandi of the author. After all, the concluding sentiment is.… “No eye is on the sparrow.”

Mourning of this magnitude creates by way of its own silent mystery a vortex of impossible, unanswerable questions, and intelligent readers do well to eschew the type of pat answers offered in so many books on grief and grieving.
The beauty (to me) of Didion’s is that it does not even offer tough, complicated ones.
It just says what is. And was.

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