loss and grief

The Year of Magical Thinking

14 November 2024 , 0

Right now several people dear to me are grappling with great loss – both present and impending. Merely being with them focuses the mind critically and changes one’s perspective. And it drew me to a book I had put off reading till the right time: The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. First published in 2005, it won the National Book Award (for books published in the USA) that year. But it comes into the ‘literary genre’ bracket which requires a certain level of determination to tackle and persist with.

On 30 December 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion (both American writers) had been to visit their newly-married and only daughter, Quintana, who was lying unconscious in an ICU bed suffering from pneumonia and sepsis. Once home, they lit a fire, cooked an evening meal, and while still at the dining table, John simply keeled over and died. Thirty-one days short of their fortieth anniversary. There was no warning; no premonition. Joan dialled for an ambulance and the paramedics tried for 45 minutes to restart his heart but to no avail.

You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
In a heartbeat.
Or the absence of one.

Joan struggled to believe it had happened. She fantasised that he was coming home. She tried to stall the obituaries because they made it too apparent that others believed he had gone. She couldn’t get rid of his shoes because he would need them when he returned.

Then less than three months after her father’s death, Quintana collapsed on the airport tarmac having suffered subdural bleeding. By the time she arrived at the Los Angeles hospital her midbrain was compressed, she was bleeding from an artery in her brain, and a large haematoma had formed. Emergency surgery was performed. Her future was again uncertain.

This book is Joan’s ‘attempt to make sense of the weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness … about marriage and children and memory … about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself’.’

She found a focus in her grief by initially concentrating on Quintana and her goals and hazards. She actively avoided anything that might trigger painful memories or powerful reactions, summarily banishing wayward thoughts. She avoided acts which reinforced the reality of John’s absence.
Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.

Her analytical approach is certainly not a universal response to great loss. The searing emotion, the rawness, are somehow given a respectable, a polite, veneer. But from a distance her reflections hold a form of truth and wisdom that perhaps some will relate to. Really it boils down to the reality that this literary style is not for everyman. Years earlier Joan had been somewhat disheartened when one of her other books was adjudged to have the potential to do well ‘among adults with sixteen-plus years of education‘. In my humble opinion The Year of Magical Thinking would probably appeal to a similar demographic.

However, reviewers have been fulsome in their praise:
There are no bogus resolutions. Questions are unanswered, huge tensions unresolved, but somehow you’re consoled. Clarity …, honesty …, powerful …, moving …, haunting …, tender …, restrained …
Yes, probably; but perhaps just not easily accessible or relatable.

(Joan Didion died in 2021 aged 87)

Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne, literary genre, loss and grief, mourning, The Year of Magical Thinking

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