Blue Nights. Joan Didion

all had seemed well when we were shaking the water off the leis onto the grass outside St. John the Divine on July 26 2003. Could you have seen, had you been walking on Amsterdam Avenue and caught sight of the bridal party that day, how utterly unprepared the mother of the bride was to accept what would happen before the year 2003 had even ended? The father of the bride dead at his own dinner table? The bride herself in an induced coma, breathing only on a respirator, not expected by the doctors in the intensive care unit to live the night? The first in a cascade of medical crises that would end twenty months later with her death?

      Twenty months during which she would be strong enough to walk unsupported for possibly a month in all?

      Twenty months during which she would spend weeks at a time in the intensive care units of four different hospitals?

      In all of those intensive care units there were the same blue-and-white printed curtains. In all of those intensive care units there were the same sounds, the same gurgling through plastic tubing, the same dripping from the IV line, the same rales, the same alarms. In all of those intensive care units there were the same requirements to guard against further infections, the donning of the double gowns, the paper slippers, the surgical cap, the mask, the gloves that pulled on only with difficulty and left a rash that reddened and bled. In all of those intensive care units there was the same racing through the unit when a code was called, the feet hitting the floor, the rattle of the crash cart.

      This was never supposed to happen to her, I remember thinking—outraged, as if she and I had been promised a special exemption—in the third of those intensive care units.

      By the time she reached the fourth I was no longer invoking this special exemption.

      When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.

      I just said that, but what does it mean?

      All right, of course I can track it, of course you can track it, another way of acknowledging that our children are hostages to fortune, but when we talk about our children what are we saying? Are we saying what it meant to us to have them? What it meant to us not to have them? What it meant to let them go? Are we talking about the enigma of pledging ourselves to protect the unprotectable? About the whole puzzle of being a parent?

      Time passes.

      Yes, agreed, a banality, of course time passes.

      Then why do I say it, why have I already said it more than once?

      Have I been saying it the same way I say I have lived most of my life in California?

      Have I been saying it without hearing what I say?

      Could it be that I heard it more this way: Time passes, but not so aggressively that anyone notices? Or even: Time passes, but not for me? Could it be that I did not figure in either the general nature or the permanence of the slowing, the irreversible changes in mind and body, the way in which you wake one summer morning less resilient than you were and by Christmas find your ability to mobilize gone, atrophied, no longer extant? The way in which you live most of your life in California, and then you don’t? The way in which your awareness of this passing time—this permanent slowing, this vanishing resilience—multiplies, metastasizes, becomes your very life?

      Time passes.

      Could it be that I never believed it?

      Did I believe the blue nights could last forever?

      3

      Last spring, 2009, I had some warnings, flags on the track, definite notices of darkening even before the blue nights came.

      L’heure bleue. The gloaming.

      Not even yet evident when that year’s darkening gave its first notices.

      The initial such notice was sudden, the ringing telephone you wish you had never answered, the news no one wants to get: someone to whom I had been close since her childhood, Natasha Richardson, had fallen on a ski slope outside Quebec (spring break, a family vacation, a bunny slope, this was never supposed to happen to her) and by the time she noticed that she did not feel entirely well she was dying, the victim of an epidural hematoma, a traumatic brain injury. She was the daughter of Vanessa Redgrave and Tony Richardson, who was one of our closest friends in Los Angeles. The first time I ever saw her she had been maybe thirteen or fourteen, not yet entirely comfortable in her own skin, an uncertain but determined adolescent with a little too much makeup and startlingly white stockings. She had come from London to visit her father at his house on Kings Road in Hollywood, an eccentrically leveled structure that had belonged to Linda Lovelace, the star of Deep Throat. Tony had bought the house and proceeded to fill it with light and parrots and whippets. When Tasha arrived from London he had brought her to dinner with us at La Scala. The dinner had not been planned as a party for her arrival but there had happened to be many people her father and we knew at La Scala that night and her father had made it feel like one. She had been pleased. A few years later Quintana had been at the same uncertain age and Tasha, by then seventeen, was spending the summer at Le Nid du Duc, the village her father had invented, an entertainment of his own, a director’s conceit, in the hills of the Var above Saint-Tropez.

      To say that Tasha was spending the summer at Le Nid du Duc fails to adequately suggest the situation. In fact, by the time John and I arrived in France that summer, Tasha was running Le Nid du Duc, the seventeen-year-old chatelaine of what amounted to a summer-long house party for a floating thirty people. Tasha was managing the provisioning of the several houses that made up the compound. Tasha was cooking and serving, entirely unaided, three meals a day for the basic thirty as well as for anyone else who happened up the hill and had a drink and waited for the long tables under the lime trees to be set—not only cooking and serving but, as Tony noted in his memoir The Long-Distance Runner, “completely unfazed when told that there’d be an extra twenty for lunch.”

      Most astonishingly, at seventeen, Tasha was undertaking the induction into adult life not only of her sisters Joely and Katharine but of two Los Angeles eighth-graders, one of them Quintana, the other Kenneth and Kathleen Tynan’s daughter Roxana, both avid to grow up, each determined to misbehave. Tasha made certain that Quintana and Roxana got to the correct spot on the beach at Saint-Tropez every afternoon, that summer’s correct spot of choice being the Aqua Club. Tasha made certain that Quintana and Roxana got a proper introduction to the Italian boys who trailed them on the beach, a “proper introduction” for Tasha entailing a meal at the long tables under the lime trees at Le Nid du Duc. Tasha came up from the Aqua Club and Tasha did a perfect beurre blanc for the fish Tony had bought that morning and Tasha watched Quintana and Roxana mesmerize the Italian boys into believing that they were dealing not with fourteen-year-olds last seen in the pastel cotton uniforms of the Westlake and Marlborough Schools for Girls in Los Angeles but with preternaturally sophisticated undergraduates from UCLA.

      And never ever, not once, not ever, did I hear Tasha blow the whistle on that or on any other of the summer’s romantic fables.

      Au contraire.

      Tasha devised the fables, Tasha wrote the romance.

      The last time I ever saw her was a few nights after she fell on the bunny slope outside Quebec, in a room at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York, lying as if about to wake.

      She was not about to wake.

      She had been flown down from Montreal while her family met in New York.

      When I left the hospital after seeing her there were photographers outside, waiting for clear camera lines on the family.

      I circled around them onto Park Avenue and walked on home.

      Her first marriage, to the producer Robert Fox, had taken place in my apartment. She had filled the rooms with quince blossoms for the ceremony. The blossoms had eventually fallen but the branches had remained, brittle and dusty, twigs breaking off, nonetheless still passing as decorative elements in the living room. When I walked in from Lenox Hill that night the apartment seemed full of photographs of Tasha and of her father and mother. Her father on location for The Border, riding a Panavision camera. Her father on location in Spain, wearing