Joan Didion just made me cry…
...but the good, glorious, robust tears of being seen and heard. Yes, I just burst into tears over my coffee.
From The Year of Magical Thinking, her collection of essays about the horrible time in which she lost both her husband and her daughter:
Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone. The connections that made up their life—both the deep connections and the apparently (until they are broken) insignificant connections—have all vanished. John and I were married for forty years. During all but the first five months of our marriage, when John was still working at Time, we both worked at home. We were together twenty-four hours a day, a fact that remained a source of both merriment and foreboding to my mother and aunts. “For richer for poorer but never for lunch,” one or another of them frequently said in the early years of our marriage.
I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response. I read something in the paper that I would normally have read to him. I notice some change in the neighborhood that would interest him”…
“I am dropping my keys on the table inside the door before I fully remember. There is no one to hear this news, nowhere to go with the unmade plan, the uncompleted thought. There is no one to agree, disagree, talk back. “I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense,” C. S. Lewis wrote after the death of his wife. “It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought, feeling after feeling, action after action, had H. for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an arrow to the string, then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead thought to H. I set out on one of them. But now there’s an impassable frontierpost across it. So many roads once; now so many cul de sacs.”
“What ended was the possibility of response” might be the most beautiful, honest, and true thing I have ever read about grief. So many things I have wanted to tell my great-grandparents, over and over. My little brother. the first Lord of the Rings movie and the Barbie movie was shadowed by the conversations that would never be had by me and Anisa, because my best friend and I had been cheated out of the experience by murder. wretched cul-de-sacs causing wrecks.
Bookshop (supports the podcast): Paperback, Ebook
Synopsis: ⚠️Warning: holiday trauma and medical details
New York Times Bestseller • National Book Award Winner • One of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize
Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later—the night before New Year’s Eve—the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.
This powerful book is Didion’ 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.
her acceptance of the 2007 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, from national book.org:
Member discussion