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“Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” Joan Didion opens her memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking with these words.
She and her husband, fellow writer John Gregory Dunne, sat down to dinner, December 30, 2003, and he died of a heart attack. For a year she couldn’t give away his clothes and shoes. Of course she knew he was dead — but he might need them. He might “come back.” She calls such behavior her “magic trick,” her year of magical thinking. She compares it to a reaction to a death notice, if you don’t let the messenger in, you don’t hear the news — then the news can somehow be more readily denied.
To explain such thinking she turned to medical literature, to studies showing that grief is not simply an emotion, but has a physical component. From Bereavement: Reactions, Consequences, and Care by the National Academy of Science’s Institute of Medicine, she learned that the most frequent immediate responses to death were shock, numbness and a sense of disbelief. In her case, the disbelief lingered.
Another study she consulted was the Institute of Medicine’s 1984 compilation which found, “like many other stressors, grief frequently leads to changes in the endocrine, immune, automatic nervous, and cardiovascular system; all of these are fundamentally influenced by brain function and neurotransmitters.”
She even consulted Emily Post’s etiquette for funerals. Post advised the bereaved should sit in a sunny room, preferably one with a fire in the fireplace, and someone should stay at the house during the funeral, to tend the fire and serve (not offer, serve) cups of hot tea or hot soup to the mourners upon their return.
Didion commented, “As I read it I remembered how cold I had been in New York Hospital the night John died. I had thought I was cold because it was December 30 . . . but I was also cold because nothing in my body was working as it should.”
My experience with my parents’ deaths is not like what Didion experienced with her husband. I lost both of them emotionally decades before I lost them to death. I didn’t consciously grieve for either one. Didion’s book, though, helped me understand how grief may have affected my sub-consciousness. I still sometimes physically balk at using common household items that used to belong to my parents. When I moved into my mother’s house, for weeks I avoided the bathtub — the same tub I used thousands of times in my youth — until I forced myself to. Such behavior is a mystery unless grief explains it.
Only on December 31, 2004, did Didion’s grief become less immediate, less raw, “I realized today for the first time that my memory of this day a year ago is a memory that does not involve John.” All the past year her life had been built around, this time, last year, her and John. To live herself, she had to relinquish the dead, let him become the photograph on the table.
