Joan Didion on grief and loss

Joan Didion, one of my very favorite writers (and thus a personal kind of writing teacher, from reading her work), has an essay in the New York Times magazine that I've been waiting for, that I knew had to be coming ever since I first covered the story of her husband's sudden passing.

Odd for me too, because after writing the TV obit of sorts the day the news came out in 2003, I decided to learn more about Gregory Dunne, and have since read two of his books on the film industry as well.

I don't mean I've been waiting for this essay with a kind of morbid fascination. Hardly. And I've struggled in recent years with some of Didion's writing, the kind that isn't quite my cup of tea, the longer books. For me, she will always be the definitive essayist, and that's the form in which she teaches me best.

So at the time, I thought to myself, I wonder what she will learn, what she has to teach me about grief and loss, because she will, if anyone can, explore it with a kind of fineness, granularity, with emotional and intellectual honesty find the unexplored and unexpected aspects of it. I wondered if I would be able to, as Emily Dickinson says, "measure every Grief I meet, with narrow probing, Eyes-- I wonder if It weighs like Mine -- Or has an Easier size."

So I read this long piece, and yes, I found my grief in it as well, the waves of it, and wept with her. That's what I was waiting for.

Link: After Life - New York Times.

September 25, 2005

After Life

By JOAN DIDION

1

Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
The question of self-pity.

Those were the first words I wrote after it happened. The computer dating on the Microsoft Word file ("Notes on change.doc") reads "May 20, 2004, 11:11 p.m.," but that would have been a case of my opening the file and reflexively pressing save when I closed it. I had made no changes to that file in May. I had made no changes to that file since I wrote the words, in January 2004, a day or two or three after the fact.

For a long time I wrote nothing else.

Life changes in the instant.

The ordinary instant.

At some point, in the interest of remembering what seemed most striking about what had happened, I considered adding those words, "the ordinary instant." I saw immediately that there would be no need to add the word "ordinary," because there would be no forgetting it: the word never left my mind. It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it. I recognize now that there was nothing unusual in this: confronted with sudden disaster, we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine errand that ended on the shoulder with the car in flames, the swings where the children were playing as usual when the rattlesnake struck from the ivy. "He was on his way home from work - happy, successful, healthy - and then, gone," I read in the account of a psychiatric nurse whose husband was killed in a highway accident. In 1966 I happened to interview many people who were living in Honolulu on the morning of December 7, 1941; without exception, these people began their accounts of Pearl Harbor by telling me what an "ordinary Sunday morning" it had been. "It was just an ordinary beautiful September day," people still say when asked to describe the morning in New York when American Airlines 11 and United Airlines 175 got flown into the World Trade towers. Even the report of the 9/11 Commission opened on this insistently premonitory and yet still dumbstruck narrative note: "Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States."

"And then - gone." In the midst of life we are in death, Episcopalians say at the graveside. Later I realized that I must have repeated the details of what happened to everyone who came to the house in those first weeks, all those friends and relatives who brought food and made drinks and laid out plates on the dining-room table for however many people were around at lunch or dinner, all those who picked up the plates and froze the leftovers and ran the dishwasher and filled our (I could not yet think my) otherwise empty apartment even after I had gone into the bedroom (our bedroom, the one in which there still lay on a sofa a faded terry-cloth XL robe bought in the 1970's at Richard Carroll in Beverly Hills) and shut the door. Those moments when I was abruptly overtaken by exhaustion are what I remember most clearly about the first days and weeks. I have no memory of telling anyone the details, but I must have done so, because everyone seemed to know them. At one point I considered the possibility that they had picked up the details of the story from one another, but immediately rejected it: the story they had was in each instance too accurate to have been passed from hand to hand. It had come from me.

[...]

Read the rest.

Comments

[Bonnie Carolan]

This week started by me posting an e-mail to Oprah about 30 seconds that changed my life. I wrote about April 27,2004 the day I came home to bring my husband to the doctor's- the back door was wide open- the dogs running in and out- I called to John-no answer- I called again and said don't think you're getting out of this-I walked into my living room and saw John face down on the floor- not moving-not breathing. I ran for a phone and called 911-I turned his lifeless body over and began CPR- counting breaths-5 compressions-breathe John breathe-the first paramedics arrived-nothing than another group-still nothing-police cars and yet another set of paramedics-still nothing- nothing but the sound of my daughter's school bus coming down the street. That 30 seconds from my backdoor to my livingroom changed my life and the lives of my 3 children forever. That is the story I sent off to Oprah. I picked up the new Newsweek and read a review of The Year of Magical Thinking-I'm embarassed to say I had never heard of Joan Didion. Embarassed because I just finished her book and and feel I know her-or even more that she knows me-every word echoed by thoughts-my heart- my life as I have come to know it in the last year and a half. My heart goes out to Joan-I can not even begin to imagine what the loss of Quintana must have done to her-I can not "see the upside" either.
Bonnie