“Life changes fast. Life changes in an instant,” begins Joan Didion’s masterful memoir The
“It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it,” Didion observes in a characteristically clear sentence. At its heart, The Year of Magical Thinking speaks to life’s chilling uncertainty. We can’t foresee if—or when—terrible things will happen. We can’t know when our beloved dog will die. We can’t know when our husband of forty years will go into cardiac arrest.
Dead dogs, cardiac events: these tragedies happen to other people (explaining why she had the ambulance numbers for New York-Presbyterian hospital, Didion states with stunning self-awareness, “I had taped the numbers by the telephone in case someone in the building needed an ambulance. Someone else.”).
When a catastrophic event wrenches apart the normal course of our day-to-day lives, the cognitive dissonance is jarring: how could something so traumatic happen when otherwise things seemed so ordinary? Meditating on the utter mundanity of the days before her husband’s death and her daughter’s hospitalization, Didion writes:
“Five days later everything outside the sixth-floor ICU at Beth Israel North still seemed normal: this was the part neither of us (although only John admitted it) could get past, one more case of maintaining a fixed focus on the clear blue sky from which the plane fell. There were still in the living room of the apartment the presents John and I had opened on Christmas night. There were still under and on a table in Quintana’s old room the presents she was unable to open on Christmas night because she was in the ICU. There were still on a table in the dining room the stacked plates and silver we had used on Christmas Eve. There were still on an American Express bill that came that day charges from the November trip we had made to Paris. When we left for Paris Quintana and Gerry had been planning their first Thanksgiving dinner. They had invited his mother and sister and brother-in-law. They were using their wedding china. Quintana had come by to get my mother’s ruby crystal glasses. We had called them on Thanksgiving Day from Paris. They were roasting a turkey and pureeing turnips.
‘And then— gone.’
How does ‘flu’ morph into whole-body infection?
I see the question now as the equivalent of a cry of helpless rage, another way of saying How could this have happened when everything was normal.”
Grief is so troublesome because it requires we reconcile two irreconcilable realities: the reality before the loss of our loved one and the reality after. In a literal sense, our loved one is gone after they die: they no longer exist in the physical plane. Yet they persist in our minds, our memory. They are—quite literally—encoded in our neural circuitry. As neuroscientist Mary-Frances O’ Connor notes in The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss, after you lose someone, “you are walking through two worlds.”
This is distinctly disorienting. The idea that your departed loved one is dead is almost impossible to digest. On one hand, you know your husband/wife/mother/father/friend is gone (you buried them in the ground in a service last Sunday, you saw—with your own eyes—their lifeless body); on the other, you feel they’re still alive. The idea that they no longer exist, that they have evaporated into nothingness is incompatible with your normal sense of reality. Like Didion, you might refuse to donate your dead husband’s shoes (after all, he might need them).
This is the “magical thinking” of Mrs. Didion’s title. Though I’ve had Didion’s moving masterpiece on my TBR for years, I never understood the choice of title. Why call a melancholy memoir about the year after your husband’s death “magical”? I didn’t understand her choice of words until I experienced grief myself. In psychological terms, magical thinking is the idea that if a person hopes for something enough or performs just the right actions, they can avoid the unavoidable. It’s the belief that our thoughts can impact the material world.
Magical thinking is insisting your dead husband will return. He’s not “dead”—he’s just on vacation.
Magical thinking is the irrational idea that you can foresee the future and thus rewrite it.
Magical thinking is the belief that you—an almost entirely powerless human—possess the power to redirect the course of uncontrollable events.
The greatest triumph of The Year of Magical Thinking is its ability to capture the insanity of grief in such sane, sober sentences. Didion becomes fixated on the day her husband died, obsessed with reconstructing the reel of his last days. If she had done x or y—she wonders—could she have somehow sidestepped his tragic fate?
While Didion is with her sick daughter at UCLA, she slips into a torturous vortex of “what if’s”:
“Had I not made the call would Quintana have moved back to Los Angeles when she graduated from Barnard? Had she been living in Los Angeles would Beth Israel North have happened, would Presbyterian have happened, would she be in UCLA today? Had I not misread the meaning of the red flashing light in late 1987 would I be able to get in my car today and drive west on San Vicente and find John at the house in Brentwood Park?”
Guilt is one of the defining traits of grief (“Would I need to relive every mistake?” Didion wonders, her heartache palpable from the page). During what Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross coined the bargaining stage of grief, the bereaved will often blame themselves for their loved one’s death. Assigning blame (no matter how absurd or illogical) makes the mountain of grief seem more surmountable. So you rationalize, you play and replay the events that led to your loved one’s death, you ruthlessly reprimand yourself with could have/should have/would have (should I have taken them to another hospital for a second opinion? could something I have done saved them from death? would they still be here if I hadn’t done “x”?), you torment yourself with what if, what if, what if.
If we are responsible for our loved one’s demise, the idea goes, we can control—and change it. Blaming ourselves is far easier than confronting a more terrifying truth: much of life cannot be manipulated or managed.
Sometimes sudden, senseless things happen.
Sometimes incomprehensible events can’t be ordered into a neat narrative.
Sometimes we can’t arrange life into a story that makes sense.
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Didion wrote in The White Album, her seminal essay collection. As a writer, her impulse is to impose a narrative onto the chaos of her husband’s death. When she can’t rewrite his ending, she compulsively analyzes the events of that night, hoping to find meaning in the meaninglessness:
“I realized that since the last morning of 2003, the morning after he died, I had been trying to reverse time, run the film backward.
It was now eight months later, August 30, 2004, and I still was.
The difference was that all through those eight months I had been trying to substitute an alternate reel. Now I was trying only to reconstruct the collision, the collapse of the dead star.”
Ultimately, humans are hubristic. If we just have the right information, call the right doctors, ask the right questions, we believe we can dictate destiny, defeat death. Didion suffers the same delusion: if she can just figure out why this happened, if she can just understand the doctor’s prognosis, she can save Quintana, she can resurrect her dead husband.
But her meeting with mortality brings about a sort of existential crisis. No matter how much she tries, she can’t direct the story of her life. Sometimes greater forces—God, destiny, fate—will intervene and cut a chapter, clip a character, compose an entirely new storyline:
“One thing I noticed during the course of those weeks at UCLA was that many people I knew, whether in New York or California or in other places, shared a habit of mind usually credited to the very successful. They believed absolutely in their own management skills. They believed absolutely in the power of the telephone numbers they had at their fingertips, the right doctor, the major donor, the person who could facilitate a favor at State or Justice. The management skills of these people were in fact prodigious. The power of their telephone numbers was unmatched. I had myself for most of my life shared the same core belief in my ability to control events. If my mother was suddenly hospitalized in Tunis I could arrange for the American consul to bring her English-language newspapers and get her onto an Air France flight to meet my brother in Paris. If Quintana was suddenly stranded in the Nice airport I could arrange with someone at British Airways to get her onto a BA flight to meet her cousin in London. Yet I had always apprehended, because I was born fearful, that some events in life would remain beyond my ability to control or manage them. Some events would just happen. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”
The Year of Magical Thinking is a memoir of compounding calamities: the death of a husband and the sickness of a still young daughter. While we expect to one day lose our spouse, it’s inconceivable for most parents to lose a child. Mothers have a single duty: to protect their young ones. Mothers comfort us when we cry. Mothers nurse us and change our diapers. Mothers hold our hand while we cross the street. Mothers reassure us there’s no monsters under the bed and tuck us under the covers. “Everything’s going to be all right.” “I won’t let anything happen to you.”
Sitting with her sick daughter at the ICU, Didion realizes no matter how much she loves Quintana, she, no one for that matter, can fulfill the one obligation of mothers:
“It occurred to me during those weeks that this had been, since the day we brought her home from St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, my basic promise to her. I would not leave. I would take care of her. She would be all right. It also occurred to me that this was a promise I could not keep. I could not always take care of her. I could not never leave her. She was no longer a child. She was an adult. Things happened in life that mothers could not prevent or fix.”
In one flashback, Didion recalls when she had an idea to float candles and gardenias in her pool at Brentwood Park. Her party guests wouldn’t arrive for another hour and she thought the candles would add a festive touch. The resulting fiasco becomes a poignant representation of man’s inability to control the cosmos’ chaos:
“I knelt on the coping and lit the candles and used the pool skimmer to guide the gardenias and candles into a random pattern. I stood up, pleased with the result. I put the pool skimmer away. When I glanced back at the pool, the gardenias had vanished and the candles were out, tiny drenched hulks bobbing furiously around the filter intake. They could not be sucked in because the filter was already clogged with gardenias. I spent the remaining forty-five minutes before the party cleaning the sodden gardenias from the filter and scooping out the candles and drying my dress with a hair dryer.”
In our culture, death remains a taboo topic, limited to funeral homes, fluorescent hospitals and dreary hospices. We don’t see death; we certainly don’t discuss it. Because of breakthroughs in science and medicine, in the last century, we’ve doubled the average human’s life span.
The result?
We think we can avoid death.
Only one logical conclusion can follow this premise: if someone we love dies (despite the miracles of modern medicine, despite cutting edge technology and treatments), it’s our fault. We should have been able to foresee the fatal car crash, predict the heart attack, stop the multiplying cancer cells. As Didion remarks in penetrating, precise prose:
“As I recall this I realize how open we are to the persistent message that we can avert death.
And to its punitive correlative, the message that if death catches us we have only ourselves to blame.”
Only after reading John’s autopsy report does Didion realize her complete and utter powerlessness to write another ending for the night of December 30th:
“Nothing he or I had done had either caused or could have prevented his death. He had inherited a bad heart. It would eventually kill him. The date on which it would kill him had already been, by many medical interventions, postponed. When that date did come, no action I could have taken in our living room—no home defibrillator, no CPR, nothing short of a fully equipped crash cart and the technical facility to follow cardioversion within seconds with IV medication—could have given him even one more day.
[…]
Only after I read the autopsy report did I stop trying to reconstruct the collusion, the collapse of the dead star. The collapse had been there all along, invisible, unsuspected.”