We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. Not only did I not believe that ‘bad luck’ had killed John and struck Quintana but in fact I believed precisely the opposite: I believed that I should have been able to prevent what happened.” Only at a later point did I begin to wonder: what exactly did ‘luck’ have to do with it?” This is what passed for staying on top of the self-pity question. The point, as I saw it, was that this gave me no right to think of myself as unlucky now. “I kept saying to myself that I had been lucky all my life. Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?” Who is the director of dreams, would he care? “I need in the dream to discuss this with John.
Each of them had been in the last instant alive, and then dead.” … Yet having seen the picture in no way deflected, when it came, the swift empty loss of the actual event. In each of those long illnesses the possibility of death had been in the picture. “In each of those cases the phrase ‘after long illness’ would have seemed to apply, trailing its misleading suggestion of release, relief, resolution. It is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself.” … This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythm of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. “This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months the cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself. I closed the book comforted in seeing that even the rawest vulnerability brought on by the wake of death can be an inchoate reverie of living. Though I intellectually realize life ends in an unforeseen instant and that there is no real preparing for or preventing death, this account of the year following Dunne’s death helped me see that it’s natural to “magically” think we can control life. It read like a peek into my undeniable future. I have not yet had someone intimately close to me die (hence the relative lack of trials, and also the knowledge of evanescence), but admire and appreciate this beautifully written memoir as a gift of deep insight. Parts of her story resonated as though hearing a stranger describe my most private feeling: that I am unusually fortunate to have a life of few tribulations and much shared happinesses – and that its evanescence makes my good life sweeter still. Over and over again I identified in her prose my own similar characteristics, ways of making sense of the world, of believing the “salad days” can be extended through an instinctive unspoken mix of luck, carelessness, purpose and communion. Reading this book I was further reminded of myself, perhaps because she is so generous and precise in evoking her most personal human emotions. I read a quote of hers about when she met him, and it reminded me of things I too thought in my 20s. Recently I was reminded that Didion shared a decades-long marriage and writing/editing partnership with John Gregory Dunne.
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