So, I made myself do it...
I read Didion's book The Year of Magical Thinking
and I'm glad I did. I do believe I shall read it again
and most likely again again.
I never once felt like crying when I was reading it.
At times, I felt I couldn't breathe, and my heart
would go into its crazy sing-song pattern of skipped
beats and gallops, and my throat
would tighten and I would have to get up for a little
while. Just get up and walk around and think about things.
She says:
"I realize as I write this that I do not want to finish this account.
Nor did I want to finish the year.
The craziness is receding but no clarity is taking its place.
I look for resolution and find none.
I did not want to finish the year because I know that
as the days pass, as January becomes February and
February becomes summer, certain things will happen.
My image of John at the instant of his death will become
less immediate, less raw. It will become something that
happened in another year. My sense of John himself,
John alive, will become remote, even "mudgy,"
softened, transmuted into whatever best serves my life
without him. In fact this is already beginning to happen.
All year I have been keeping time by last year's calendar:
what were we doing on this day last year, where did we
have dinner, is it the day a year ago we flew to Honolulu...
...I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to
keep them alive in order to keep them with us.
I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes
a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them
go, keep them dead.
Let them become the photograph on the table.
Let them become the name on the trust accounts.
Let go of them in the water.
Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of
him in the water."
*
Cloudy today. Chance of strong storms. Need to mow
before the rain gets here but who knows if I will.
Right now, I need to move around. Get Molly up.
Take her outside before the rain comes.
Straighten up the house. Plan dinner.
Wash my face and brush my teeth. Drink some coffee.
Let the dead go today and join the living.
2 comments:
i didn't like the didion book. she's always been a cold one, and death only made her moreso. and there is a kind of dedication to form in her stuff that puts one off, as if the words were more important than the emotion. i didn't cry either, but that was because i thought the book was almost entirely predictable in its love of understatement.
there was great tragedy here, in the deaths of both husband and daughter. but she writes as she always has, like everything that happens is somehow just another chapter in play it as it lays.
Hi jim,
I read other comments about the book which echo your feelings.
I found it strangely comforting.
I am so emotional, and she seems to be so unemotional, or even cold, as you say, yet she captures the feelings of loss beautifully.
How one sentence won't leave you alone for the day--the last sentence you heard your dead loved one speak, perhaps, or how one place you've been together keeps coming to mind or how in the middle of a conversation, one word takes you miles and years away.
How you are suddenly and/or imminently thrust into loss and change.
Those are the qualities I admire in the book.
You realize her daughter did not die until after the book was published? She was seriously ill in the first year following John's death but had made a rather miraculous recovery before Didion started the book. She died two years after her father (I think).
Now I'm reading Running With Scissors. Crazy childhoods are something I know something about, so I am enjoying the read.
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