The Year of Magical Thinking. Joan Didion

eyes.

       and what i want to know is

       how do you like your blueeyed boy

       Mister Death

      I could not that morning remember who wrote those lines. I thought it was Ε. Ε. Cummings but I could not be sure. I did not have a volume of Cummings but found an anthology on a poetry shelf in the bedroom, an old textbook of John’s, published in 1949, when he would have been at Portsmouth Priory, the Benedictine boarding school near Newport to which he was sent after his father died.

      (His father’s death: sudden, cardiac, in his early fifties, I should have taken that warning.)

      If we happened to be anywhere around Newport John would take me to Portsmouth to hear the Gregorian chant at vespers. It was something that moved him. On the flyleaf of the anthology there was written the name Dunne, in small careful handwriting, and then, in the same handwriting, blue ink, fountain-pen blue ink, these guides to study: 1) What is the meaning of the poem and what is the experience? 2) What thought or reflection does the experience lead us to? 3) What mood, feeling, emotion is stirred or created by the poem as a whole? I put the book back on the shelf. It would be some months before I remembered to confirm that the lines were in fact Ε. Ε. Cummings. It would also be some months before it occurred to me that my anger at this unknown caller from New York Hospital reflected another version of the primitive dread that had not for me been awakened by the autopsy question.

      What was the meaning and what the experience?

      To what thought or reflection did the experience lead us?

      How could he come back if they took his organs, how could he come back if he had no shoes?

       4.

      On most surface levels I seemed rational. To the average observer I would have appeared to fully understand that death was irreversible. I had authorized the autopsy. I had arranged for cremation. I had arranged for his ashes to be picked up and taken to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where, once Quintana was awake and well enough to be present, they would be placed in the chapel off the main altar where my brother and I had placed our mother’s ashes. I had arranged for the marble plate on which her name was cut to be removed and recut to include John’s name. Finally, on the 23rd of March, almost three months after his death, I had seen the ashes placed in the wall and the marble plate replaced and a service held.

      We had Gregorian chant, for John.

      Quintana asked that the chant be in Latin. John too would have asked that.

      We had a single soaring trumpet.

      We had a Catholic priest and an Episcopal priest.

      Calvin Trillin spoke, David Halberstam spoke, Quintana’s best friend Susan Traylor spoke. Susanna Moore read a fragment from “East Coker,” the part about how “one has only learnt to get the better of words / For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which / One is no longer disposed to say it.” Nick read Catullus, “On His Brother’s Death.” Quintana, still weak but her voice steady, standing in a black dress in the same cathedral where she had eight months before been married, read a poem she had written to her father.

      I had done it. I had acknowledged that he was dead. I had done this in as public a way as I could conceive.

      Yet my thinking on this point remained suspiciously fluid. At dinner in the late spring or early summer I happened to meet a prominent academic theologian. Someone at the table raised a question about faith. The theologian spoke of ritual itself being a form of faith. My reaction was unexpressed but negative, vehement, excessive even to me. Later I realized that my immediate thought had been: But I did the ritual I did it all. I did St. John the Divine, I did the chant in Latin, I did the Catholic priest and the Episcopal priest, I did “For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past” and I did “In paradisum deducant angeli.”

       And it still didn’t bring him back.

      “Bringing him back” had been through those months my hidden focus, a magic trick. By late summer I was beginning to see this clearly. “Seeing it clearly” did not yet allow me to give away the clothes he would need.

      In time of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control. Given that grief remained the most general of afflictions its literature seemed remarkably spare. There was the journal C. S. Lewis kept after the death of his wife, A Grief Observed. There was the occasional passage in one or another novel, for example Thomas Mann’s description in The Magic Mountain of the effect on Hermann Castorp of his wife’s death: “His spirit was troubled; he shrank within himself; his benumbed brain made him blunder in his business, so that the firm of Castorp and Son suffered sensible financial losses; and the next spring, while inspecting warehouses on the windy landing-stage, he got inflammation of the lungs. The fever was too much for his shaken heart, and in five days, notwithstanding all Dr. Heidekind’s care, he died.” There were, in classical ballets, the moments when one or another abandoned lover tries to find and resurrect one or another loved one, the blued light, the white tutus, the pas de deux with the loved one that foreshadows the final return to the dead: la danse des ombres, the dance of the shades. There were certain poems, in fact many poems. There was a day or two when I relied on Matthew Arnold, “The Forsaken Merman”:

       Children’s voices should be dear

       (Call once more) to a mother’s ear;

       Children’s voices, wild with pain—

       Surely she will come again!

      There were days when I relied on W. H. Auden, the “Funeral Blues” lines from The Ascent of F6:

       Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

       Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

       Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

       Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

      The poems and the dances of the shades seemed the most exact to me.

      Beyond or below such abstracted representations of the pains and furies of grieving, there was a body of sub-literature, how-to guides for dealing with the condition, some “practical,” some “inspirational,” most of either useless. (Don’t drink too much, don’t spend the insurance money redecorating the living room, join a support group.) That left the professional literature, the studies done by the psychiatrists and psychologists and social workers who came after Freud and Melanie Klein, and quite soon it was to this literature that I found myself turning. I learned from it many things I already knew, which at a certain point seemed to promise comfort, validation, an outside opinion that I was not imagining what appeared to be happening. From Bereavement: Reactions, Consequences, and Care, compiled in 1984 by the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine, I learned for example that the most frequent immediate responses to death were shock, numbness, and a sense of disbelief: “Subjectively, survivors may feel like they are wrapped in a cocoon or blanket; to others, they may look as though they are holding up well. Because the reality of death has not yet penetrated awareness, survivors can appear to be quite accepting of the loss.”

      Here, then, we had the “pretty cool customer” effect.

      I read on. Dolphins, I learned from J. William Worden of the Harvard Child Bereavement Study at Massachusetts General Hospital, had been observed refusing to eat after the death of a mate. Geese had been observed reacting to such a death by flying and calling, searching until they themselves became disoriented and lost. Human beings, I read but did not need to learn, showed similar patterns of response. They searched. They stopped