Loss, grief and the moving memoir of Joan Didion “The year of magical thinking”

Loss is one thing, grief is something else. When one loses somebody close, there is an immediate void, an existential black hole, a sudden disorientation, a reluctance to accept the absence. That is loss. But grief sets in a little later, when time blunts the sharp edges of the loss, and slowly replaces the void with memories. Memories of insignificant events we never knew we remembered, trivial snippets of conversations that suddenly assume significance, friendly quarrels, and casual gestures. These were shared experiences once, and now, in moments of grief, they swell up to the surface with increasing frequency and intensity, sucking us into a psychological vortex, from which release seems difficult. Everything seen, touched, felt, and tasted reminds us of the other. That is grief. It is the prolonged presence of grief that can kill again, and not the loss. Grief doesn’t pass away, either, one gets used to it. It metamorphoses into self-pity and in the process changes the way we live. Grief permeates our being slowly, gradually, until we realize we cannot fight it, can’t get over it completely; and at that moment, a strange reconciliation happens within, and we move on.

“Life changes fast.

Life changes in the instant.

You sit down for dinner and life as you know it ends.

The question of self-pity”

Joan Didion begins her sensitive meditation on loss and grief in “The year of magical thinking” with this blank verse. On 30th December 2003, five days after Christmas, at 9 PM, Joan and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, returned home from the Beth Israel hospital at East end Avenue in New York. They were visiting their daughter Quintana, who was in the ICU in a state of induced coma and life support. Quintana was admitted seven days ago with a mild fever that quickly cascaded into Pneumonia and then septic shock. No one could explain why this happened. She was good one moment and suddenly had to be moved into the ICU. After returning home that night, Joan announced she was going to the kitchen to prepare dinner; John sat down in the living room with a book. A minute later, Joan heard the noise of something falling; she hurried to the living room. John lay on the floor, a trace of blood oozing out of his mouth. He was motionless. He was dead — a massive cardiac arrest.

Joan and John had been married for forty years. A relationship forged in the common love of the written word, deep respect, and love for each other. Both were accomplished writers. Joan — one of the foremost essayists and novelists of Americal letters in modern times, and John no less a successful novelist and essayist himself. Theirs was a full life until it ended in a split second on the night of 30th December — “You sit down for dinner and life as you know it ends”. When John died, and with Quintana still in hospital unaware that her father is dead, Joan’s sleepwalked through the months that followed. The gnawing, persistent feeling anyone who has ever lost a loved one knows, “ Could I have done something to change the course of events?” surfaces. Past conversations take on a premonitory note. The mind attempts to discover if there is anything in the string of cause of effects that could have led to this loss. A wave of self-pity takes over.

There is a frivolity about happiness that makes it seem superficial and ephemeral; pain, on the other hand, possesses a fathomless depth, a deep-rooted presence that consumes and is difficult to shake away. Moreover, the journey through loss and pain is very personal. It cannot be generalized. Everyone can laugh at the same joke, but not all can cry over specific pain. Even words describe and can express grief only up to a certain point, beyond that, verbalization falters, and what remains are grief’s emblems — the shuddering paroxysms of despair and helplessness that ripples through the body when we remember and grieve. That is the meaning of the word unconsolable. In the 2018 sequel to Equalizer, a brilliant Denzel Washington film, the protagonist tells a man he is about to punish “ There are two kinds of pain: one that hurts, and one that alters”. This sums it up. Happiness is always singular, but grief comes in multiple shades. In Joan’s case, the pain over the sudden loss of John, though catastrophic at first, slowly, bit by bit the grief metamorphoses into more profound questions and alters her perception of life and events. From the deep wells of grief, a new sense of reality emerges.

After a year of grappling with her loss and grief, Joan wrote “The year of magical thinking” in 2004. Perhaps, in a way, the book wrote itself. It was a cathartic act, and in the writing of the book, Joan attempted to untie the knots, to come to grips with her solitude and loneliness. It was a year of disembodied existence without the presence of the other, and the book chronicles the path of her gradual inner movement from the blunt shock of death to a no-man’s land of grief. Words were Joan’s medium to articulate and perhaps become whole once again. The greatest memoirs and novels are often those that deal with pain and loss. We remember the beginning of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “ Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. It is grief that often draws out the most intense narratives, and Joan’s “ The year of magical thinking” is among the precise and most personal descriptions of grief and its evolution in time. Recently, in a collection of personal essays, I read a letter by Plutarch, the Greek Philosopher, written to his wife as a consolation on the loss of their daughter. In the letter, he advises that “grief must be stopped at the doorstep and shouldn’t be allowed to invade the innermost citadels of the self”. I wonder if that is possible at all. Can we love someone, and not grieve over their loss? Yet, there is some truth in his advice; grief, if unchecked in its progress and unexamined, can never be transcended.

I love Joan Didion’s writing. There is a directness to her sentences (much like Hemmingway’s, only much more polished and chiseled) that holds the reader’s attention. Her language has a beautiful cadence, so clear, so flowing, like a river with hardly a ripple in it. Barbara Tuchman, the great historian, often said that a sentence should sound good before it is grammatically accurate. That is very true of Joan’s prose. By her reckoning, she never cared much about grammar (her Husband John did, and all her writing was edited by him). As long the sentence sounded right to the ears, the grammar came out well in most cases. In “the year of magical thinking”, she performs a literary miracle: objectifying her innermost self with all its fears, insecurities, grief and confusion, into translucent prose. There are many passages in the book, especially those that describe her encounters with grief, that find resonance in our own. How a single visual sensation, say of a familiar hoarding, a known street or restaurant, a beautiful twilight can open up a dam of bottled up memories dragging us into a swirling vortex of a past that was once shared with someone we loved and cherished. While reality has changed, our memories haven’t. In such moments, we lose the sense of chronological time. A surge of grief accompanies our return to normalcy.

“The year of Magical thinking” won the Pulitzer award, the National book award, and many accolades in 2005. It was made into a single-act play, a monologue, brilliantly performed by Joan’s friend and fine actor Vanessa Redgrave. The book is a subject of study in many English courses as a classic on mourning and loss. It is certainly not an easy book to read, but for those who undertake the journey, it is very rewarding. The writing gives voice to deep concerns, questions, and doubts we often tend to brush away under the carpet. It is one of the essential functions of art and literature, in particular, to open uncomfortable doors, to widen and deepen perspectives. “The year of magical thinking” does just that. Before you read this book, it may help to watch the 2017 Netflix documentary “The Center will not hold” on Joan’s life, shot by her nephew, Griffin Dunne. A beautiful documentary that captures the fragile yet strong Joan at 87, still holding on to her center, though the title suggests otherwise. This film will give the reader a good perspective on Joan’s life and work.

To conclude this essay, Here is a line from the book that captures the essence and meaning of loss and mourning:

“A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”

One cannot capture the loss of a loved one better than this.

God bless…

yours in mortality,

Bala