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The year of magical thinking – Joan Didion and the dialectic of grief

Article in Medical Humanities · June 2008

DOI: 10.1136/jmh.2008.000271 · Source: PubMed

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1
Calvary Hospital, Sydney,
Australia; 2 Calvary Hospital
Bereavement Counseling
Service, Calvary Hospital,
Sydney, Australia
Correspondence to:
Frank Brennan, Department of
Palliative Care, Calvary Hospital,
Sydney, Australia;
fpbrennan@ozemail.com.au
Accepted 26 February 2008
J Med Ethics; Medical Humanities 2008;34:35–39. doi:10.1136/jmh.2008.000271
The year of magical thinking: Joan Didion and the
dialectic of grief
F Brennan,1 M Dash2
ABSTRACT
Joan Didion is a prominent American writer. In late 2003,
while her only child lay critically ill, her husband, John,
died suddenly. Theirs was a marriage of great intimacy
and love. Grief enveloped her. Eventually she began to
write an account of the first 12 months of her bereave-
ment and the vigil for her child: The year of magical
thinking. Raw, insightful and challenging, it is a rich,
generous and graceful document. Didion draws on the
literature of grief, personal and professional. Here, those
readings are examined and reflections are made on the
singular, unique grief of the author in the context of
current theories on bereavement.
Death is universal. Grief flows like a river from this
source. Throughout history, writers have attempted
to depict grief. Aeschlyus, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, C S
Lewis, Whitman and De Beauvoir. Perhaps it is
inevitable that the greatest writers of each genera-
tion will do so. Our times, replete with loss, national
and international, are no exception. At once personal
and universal, The year of magical thinking,1 by Joan
Didion, strikingly describes the first 12 months after
her husband’s death and the course of her daughter’s
illness. This paper examines Didion’s experience and
reflects on that experience in the light of modern
theories of bereavement.
The facts are simple. John Gregory Dunne and
Joan Didion were a married couple living in New
York. They were prominent writers. In December
2003, Quintana, their only child, fell seriously ill.
One evening after visiting her in hospital they
returned home. Joan began preparing a meal.
Without warning John collapsed. An ambulance
arrived and the officers attempted resuscitation.
Upon arrival at hospital he was declared dead. The
postmortem found that he had died of a major
myocardial infarction.
Repeatedly Joan revisits the evening when John
died. She searches for retrospective signs, portents.
She looks, in short, for the extraordinary when
there was only the ordinary. ‘‘It was in fact the
ordinary nature of everything preceding the event
that prevented me from truly believing it had
happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting
past it’’ (Didion,1 p4).The abruptness, the brutal
separation of the past and the future. For Didion it
is incomprehensible that, without preamble, the
simple domestic act of sitting down to dinner led
to this tragic event. As she writes, ‘‘Life changes in
the instant. The ordinary instant.’’ Didion, the
sculptor of language, is rendered mute. She cannot
write. For months. Nine months later she begins to
write. This book is its product. It is a narrative of
great power. It is a testimony of grief. It invites the
Original article
reader to witness the author as she grapples with
the losses of the most crucial relationship in her
adult life. It is a book of great generosity and grace.
The shocking clash between the ‘‘ordinary
instant’’ and the extraordinary loss that flows
from that instant reverberates in Didion’s mind.
That loss overturns her: it ‘‘cut loose any fixed idea
I ever had about death, about illness, about
probability and luck … about marriage and
children and memory, about grief, about the ways
in which people do or do not deal with the fact
that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity,
about life itself’’ (Didion,1 p7).
The marriage of Joan and John was one of great
closeness and intimacy. Of their 40 years of
married life, they had worked together at home
for 35. ‘‘Because we were both writers and both
worked at home our days were filled with the
sound of each other’s voices.’’ They listened to
each other’s ideas, proof-read each other’s work,
encouraged each other. Indeed, the last gift John
gave to his wife is the most precious gift any writer
can give to another, especially when the writers are
married to each other. After reading aloud a
beautiful piece from one of Didion’s books, he said
to her: ‘‘Don’t ever tell me you can’t write. That is
my birthday present to you.’’ ‘‘I remember tears
coming to my eyes. I feel them now’’ (Didion,1
p166). But with his death, that closeness brings
with it a deep sadness, the sense of wanting to
share things that cannot now occur. Initially she
expects him to at home when she walks in. She
quotes C S Lewis: ‘‘I am beginning to understand
why grief feels like suspense … It comes from the
frustration of so many impulses that had become
so habitual. Thought after thought, feeling after
feeling, action after action, had H. for their object.
Now their target is gone … So many roads lead
thought to H. I set out on one of them. But there’s
an impassable frontier across it. So many roads
once; now so many cul de sacs.’’2
Didion’s memories of the events surrounding
John’s death are photographic. Indeed, her mem-
ories of key events in their lives—the time of the
day, the weather, the look and feel of flowers, their
conversation, grass, wind on their faces—is crystal-
line. And it is that detail, layer upon layer, that lies
at the heart of this grief, this loss. John is
irreplaceable. She quotes Phillip Aries from
Western attitudes toward death: ‘‘ A single person is
missing for you, and the whole world is empty.’’3
MAGICAL THINKING
The title of Didion’s book captures a recurrent
theme of the first year of her loss. Highly intelligent,
clear-sighted and practical, she repeatedly thinks in
35
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Original article
‘‘magical’’ ways, quiet delusions about loss and finality. Such
magical thinking occurs on multiple levels. That, before his
death, John was giving clues to his own mortality. As a
writer Didion weighs words carefully. Every casual remark
(indeed, especially every casual remark) has a resonance.
Repeatedly and minutely Didion goes over the last months
leading to John’s death—did he have a premonition, was he
preparing her for his death, what did he mean by that aside,
that look? The other question she asks in cycles is ‘‘What
could I have done?’’ This preoccupies her: ‘‘I could have
saved him … I was trying to work out what time it had
been when he died and whether it was that time yet in Los
Angeles. (Was there time to go back? Could we have made a
difference ending on Pacific time?)’’ (Didion,1 p31).
Once John is dead, magical thinking then emerges with the
reversibility of his death. She keeps his shoes and clothes in
preparation for his return. She is both consoled and affronted at
the concept of his autopsy; whatever ‘‘had gone wrong was
something simple and could be easily fixed’’. Later she asks,
‘‘How could he come back if they took his organs … ?’’ She
observes herself: ‘‘On most surface levels I seemed rational. To
the average observer I would have appeared to fully understand
that death was irreversible … My thinking remained suspi-
ciously fluid … ’’ (Didion,1 pp42–3). When a theologian speaks
of ritual being a form of faith, Didion is surprised at the
vehemence of her own unexpressed response. To her, that
misses the point entirely; despite meticulously arranging the
funeral rituals, ‘‘it still didn’t bring him back’’ (Didion’s italics)
(Didion,1 p43). Indeed, she acknowledges that ‘‘ ‘‘Bringing him
back’’ had been through these months my hidden focus, a magic
trick. By late summer I was beginning to see this clearly. ‘‘Seeing
it clearly’’ did not yet allow me to give away the clothes he
would need’’ (Didion,1 p44).
Joan feels she has entered another world that only those in
grief know and understand. ‘‘People who had recently lost
someone have a certain look … The look is one of extreme
vulnerability, nakedness, openness. These people who have lost
someone look naked because they think themselves invisible for
a period of time, incorporeal. I seemed to have crossed one of
those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead,
entered a place in which I could be seen only by those who were
themselves recently bereaved’’ (Didion,1 pp74–5).
She visits and revisits his death and its cause. She scours the
medical documents and death certificate and muses over each
word. To writers, words are of supreme importance. The clinical
detachment of such words as ‘‘lividity’’ and ‘‘fixed dilated
pupils’’ can’t convey the particularity of the context—that this
is John’s body, life and death. It is only with a supreme effort
that she acknowledges that John’s known coronary artery
disease caused the death and not any action of her own. The
shock of the irreversibility lasts the year and, indeed, ‘‘only after
the autopsy report did I stop trying to reconstruct the collision,
the collapse of the dead star. The collapse had been there all
along, invisible, unsuspected’’ (Didion,1 p207). She reflects on
cause, effect and responsibility: ‘‘nothing he or I had done or not
done had either caused or could have prevented his death.’’ And
yet in modern affluent societies, with their emphasis on
preventive health, death is seen either as unmentionable or as
invited by our own actions. Didion captures this dualism: ‘‘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’’ (Didion,1
p206).
36
GRIEF
Grief and themes of grief course through this book. Didion
writes with torturous clarity. Her suffering suffuses the pages.
From all sides and as time unfolds. Time and distance: ‘‘Grief
turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. 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. We misconstrue the nature of
even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is
sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be
obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind’’ (Didion,1
p188).
And it is this tension—between an imagined grief and the
reality of grief—that is one of the greatest strengths of these
reflections. It is no use superimposing on this intensely personal
process some model of restoration: ‘‘In the version of grief we
imagine, the model will be ‘‘healing’’. A certain forward
movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest
days. We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will
be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take
place … We have no way of knowing that the funeral will be
anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped
in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the
occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the
heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief
as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very
opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments
during which we will confront the experience of meaningless-
ness itself’’ (Didion,1 pp188–9).
In her meditation on grief Didion weighs up two perspectives:
the universal and the personal. Since childhood she has accepted
the inevitability of change and the grand indifference of nature.
To her this is encapsulated in the prayer As it was in the
beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Against this
is the personal nature of her life lived, especially with her
husband and daughter. To her these are embodied in the
‘‘immensely personal’’ details of her domestic life—cooking
meals, shared holidays, raising their child. She sums this up as
These fragments I have shored against my ruins. Here lies the
challenge—to balance the rational understanding that change,
including death, is inevitable against the depth of meaning in
her existence. These two systems existed on parallel tracks: ‘‘In
my unexamined mind there was always a point, John and my
death, at which the tracks would converge for a final time’’
(Didion,1 p191).
Another aspect of her grief that she contemplates is that of
self-pity. Didion weighs this up carefully and concludes that
what may be taken for ‘‘self-pity’’ or, worse, ‘‘wallowing’’, is
normal, natural regard. This person was and is unique to you.
You cannot dismiss his importance. Indeed, anything else would
be artificial. She recalls that as a younger woman she viewed
with disdain the grief and ‘‘whining’’ of Caitlin Thomas, the
widow of Dylan Thomas. Chastened, Didion concludes that
‘‘time is the school in which we learn.’’ There is a strong echo
here in the psychological shift made by Simone De Beauvoir in A
very easy death.4 De Beauvoir confessed to critically viewing
women grieving over a loss: ‘‘If I met a woman of fifty
overcome with sadness because she had just lost her mother, I
thought her neurotic: we were all mortal; at eighty you are
quite old enough to be one of the dead.’’ Once De Beauvoir’s
own mother dies, that perspective changes completely: ‘‘The
knowledge that because of her age my mother’s life must soon
come to an end did not lessen the horrible surprise … it is as
violent and unforeseen as an engine stopping in the middle of
J Med Ethics; Medical Humanities 2008;34:35–39. doi:10.1136/jmh.2008.000271
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the sky … There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing
that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls
the world into question. All men must die: but for every man
his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to
it, an unjustifiable violation’’ (De Beauvoir,4 pp105–6).
Didion describes the enormous energy consumed by the
process of grieving. As she hovers in her mind between this
world and the next, the ordinary becomes worse than mundane.
It drains her. She is not engaged. She can barely tolerate
socialising. She notices herself getting up from dinner too
abruptly. She finds conversation difficult: ‘‘On such occasions I
hear myself trying to make an effort and failing … ’’
For a while there is little response. Just as C S Lewis described
in A grief observed the sensations of loss, so Didion testifies to
grief’s relentless physicality: ‘‘Grief comes in waves, paroxysms,
sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes
and obliterate the dailiness of life’’ (Didion,1 p27).
By the first anniversary of John’s death, Didion senses a
change and acknowledges it openly to herself. She realises that
with the passing of time ‘‘my image of John at the instant of his
death will become less immediate, less raw. It will become
something that happened in another year.’’ Once the anniver-
sary passes, another insight appears: ‘‘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 this involves the concept of
‘‘holding on’’. Initially it is a firm anticipation of his return.
Now musing over this year she concludes, ‘‘I know why we try
to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep
them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there
comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them
go, keep them dead’’ (Didion,1 pp225–6).
Inevitably this involves a contemplation of her own
mortality: ‘‘We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that
mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very
complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also
mourn, for better or worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no
longer. As we will one day not be at all’’ (Didion,1 p198).
MOTHER AND DAUGHTER
Quintana’s illness, John’s death and Joan’s subsequent bereave-
ment occur with shocking contemporaniety. Quintana is
admitted to the Intensive Care Unit on Christmas Day, 2003,
with pneumonia and septic shock. John dies 5 days later. About
2 weeks later Quintana is well enough to be informed of her
father’s death. Within 3 days of discharge she re-presents with
pulmonary emboli. In March she attends a memorial service for
her father. Two days later she and her husband travel to
California. On arrival at the airport, Quintana collapses with a
subdural haematoma.
The sudden collapse of her daughter throws Didion into
another crisis. That crisis has practical and reflective layers.
Domestic memories of love and intimacy, already strong after
John’s death, broaden to include their entire lives together as a
family. Everything is examined. Sights and sounds remind her.
Even the streets she travels to visit Quintana in hospital pitch
her into the past. And again it is to language and the enduring
power of intimate language that she returns. For years John had
told his daughter, ‘‘I love you more than even one more day.’’
John said this to his daughter as he accompanied her down the
aisle on her wedding day. John had whispered this to Quintana
as she lay unconscious in New York. Joan savors this phrase.
Joan has a strong maternal instinct to protect. But she
acknowledges that the promise she made to protect and never
J Med Ethics; Medical Humanities 2008;34:35–39. doi:10.1136/jmh.2008.000271
Original article
leave Quintana cannot possibly be kept: ‘‘Things happened in
life that mothers could not protect or fix.’’
THE LITERATURE OF GRIEF
In her experience of loss, Didion turns, as she has throughout
her life, to literature. She notes that ‘‘given that grief remained
the most general of afflictions its literature seemed remarkably
spare.’’ She cites A grief observed by C S Lewis, The magic
mountain by Thomas Mann, The forsaken merman by Mathew
Arnold and Funeral Blues from The ascent of F6 by W H Auden.
These are rich pieces and each offers insights. She goes on to
explore the subliterature of grief. Pithily she sums these up as
‘‘how-to guides for dealing with the condition, some ‘‘practi-
cal’’, some ‘‘inspirational’’, ‘‘most of either useless’’’’ (Didion,1
p45).
Finally she turns to the professional literature. This proved
helpful: ‘‘I learned from it many things I already knew, which at
a certain point seemed to promise comfort, validation, an
outside opinion that I was not imagining what appeared to be
happening.’’ Didion cites Freud, Klein, seminal research on the
mortality of widows5 and other bereaved persons6 and the
landmark Bereavement: reactions, consequences and care,7 compiled
by the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine. She
explored the distinction drawn in the literature between
‘‘normal’’ and ‘‘pathological’’ bereavement. She is intrigued,
for obvious reasons, by the risks of the latter. Those risks
include two contexts that Didion was herself facing—that the
bereaved person was very dependent on the deceased for
‘‘pleasure, support or esteem’’ and, second, if the grieving
process is delayed or interrupted by circumstances such as a
delayed funeral or the illness or death of a second person.
TO WHAT EXTENT DOES THE DESCRIPTION OF DIDION’S GRIEF
REFLECT THE CURRENT THEORIES ON BEREAVEMENT?
Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
The question of self-pity.
Joan Didion’s opening verse which prefaces her account of the
year in her life following the sudden and unexpected death of
her husband evokes the way in which grief can erupt into a
normal life. Her exploration through this strange new land-
scape echoes the attempts throughout the 20th century to
develop theories that both explored this landscape and yet
encapsulated it within a map or framework applicable to all
bereaved human beings. In the final line of the above opening,
Didion also hints at a shadow that was either engendered or
released by these early attempts to quantify grief. Early grief
theories with their ‘‘stages’’, ‘‘phases’’ and ‘‘tasks’’, beginning
with Freud and moving through Kubler-Ross, Bowlby, Parkes,
Worden and others, have in many instances been pressed into
the service of formulating linear, prescriptive and goal-oriented
models. Why this may be so historically is suggested in Freud’s
influential work Mourning and melancholia, which proposes that
the goal of the bereaved is to detach libidinal energy from the
deceased in order to form new attachments.8 The healthy
narcissist in the course of a relationship transposes his or her
own self-love onto another and in doing so gains a sense of
separation and as a result ensures a normal course of mourning.
However, psychologically at-risk persons who exhibit a
pathological mourning style find themselves with the task of
37
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renouncing the past and finding a substitute for the deceased
and in doing so restoring their sense of self.
The stated need to ‘‘work on oneself’’ to separate from the
other suggests a strongly individualistic protestant work ethic
tinged potentially with what might be called a psychoanalytic
protestant worth ethic. This ethic praises the work of self-
development, forward movement and resolution but in the
process potentially invokes and demonises its ‘‘pathological’’,
idle shadow: Didion’s ‘‘question of self-pity’’. It has been
suggested that the effect of the many dead in the two great
wars and the consequent inability of engaging in more
measured, Victorian ways of mourning may have influenced
this trend. Whatever the reason, Didion, praised as a ‘‘pretty
cool customer’’ (Didion,1 p15), exemplifies Gorer’s insight that a
modern trend has been to ‘‘treat mourning as a morbid self-
indulgence and to give social admiration to the bereaved who
hide their grief’’ (Didion,1 p60).
A partial profile of the face of grief that Didion shows to the
world might be read as conforming to what Walters calls the
‘‘clinical lore of grief work’’.9 This is the notion of ‘‘working
through of painful emotions, by which process the mourner
eventually lets go of attachments to the deceased and resolves
the grief in the course of a year or two’’,9 or, as Didion flatly
calls it, ‘‘getting past it’’. John Bowlby, the father of attachment
theory, suggested that one of the difficulties in ‘‘getting past it’’
and the consequent need for grief work could be traced to the
anxiety arising from the biological function of grief that sought
to re-establish a connection to an unavailable attachment
figure.10 However, Susan Bennett Smith suggests that Bowlby
took issue with Freud’s claim that ‘‘Mourning has a quite
precise psychical task to perform: its function is to detach the
survivor’s memories and hopes from the dead’’ and that Bowlby
further asserted that a continuing sense of the presence of the
dead person was compatible with a favorable outcome.11
Colin Murray Parkes’ model of psychosocial transition moved
beyond viewing grief as a static event with a single function and
emphasised grief as a non-linear process.12 William Worden
followed, suggesting a series of tasks that would actively engage
the mourner in this process and assist with accepting the reality
of the loss, experiencing the pain of grief, adjusting to an
environment without the deceased and relocating the deceased
emotionally.13 Parkes particularly noted the need to make sense
of the loss and to adjust the ‘‘assumptive world’’ when existing
assumptions would not fit with pre-existing ways of under-
standing the world.
However, Joan Didion movingly articulates the painful nexus
between being called to act in the world as ‘‘a cool customer’’
without the loved person and in the process adjusting one’s
assumptive world, alongside the fervent, immediate and often
private desire to deny or avoid the fact of the person’s death, to
‘‘substitute an alternate reel … to reverse time, run the film
backward’’ (Didion,1 p184). Her struggle to ‘‘reverse time’’ and
come to the simple stark reality of the death, to reconstruct the
‘‘collision, the collapse of the dead star’’ (Didion,1 p184), is still
felt desperately 8 months after the event. In this, Didion’s
encounter with grief echoes theories of grieving that focus on
the ongoing relationship and continuing sense of attachment to
the deceased. ‘‘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’’(Didion,1 p194). This ‘‘impulse’’ towards
maintenance and reconstruction of a relationship is recognised
and given theoretical voice in several newer influential models.
Klass and colleagues challenge or expand upon the traditional
38
notion of grief work.14 They propose that grief is not either
always present or finally absent, that grieving is an ongoing
process of adaptation and change and that one doesn’t recover
from bereavement. In other words, bereavement affects the
continuing life of the mourner; there is no need to let go or get
over it. When Didion says, ‘‘I look for resolution and find none’’
(Didion,1 p225), she echoes Robert Anderson, who many years
after the death of his wife wrote, ‘‘Death ends a life, but it does
not end a relationship, which struggles on in the survivor’s mind
toward some resolution which it never finds.’’15
In an attempt to integrate this dynamic oscillation between
focusing on the loss and re-engaging in a life without the other,
Stroebe and colleagues propose a dual process model.16 Loss
orientation encompasses what has been called grief work,
reconnecting with the person who has died through activities or
objects that recall their life and presence; ‘‘I know why we try
to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep
them with us’’ (Didion,1 p225). Restoration orientation
incorporates the avoidance of the fact of the loss—Didion’s
‘‘avoiding any venue I might associate with either Quintana or
John’’—as well as focusing on the tasks of re-engagement. These
can include developing a new identity and new relationships,
coping with the ensuing stressors, and acquiring new skills, such
as cooking or dealing with finances, that were associated with the
deceased. Perhaps this is a more detailed modern unfolding of an
older truth noted by Kierkegaard: that life can only be understood
backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
Robert Neimeyer, working from a social constructivist model,
explores the need to reconstruct meaning after the loss of the
assumptive world. He argues that relearning the world is not
exclusively psychological, but is also developed within a social
and cultural matrix.17 The human difficulty of this task is
evoked by Didion: ‘‘Nor can we know ahead of the fact, the
unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of
meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we
will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself’’ (Didion,1
p189). This lends a poignant weight to theorists such as
Bonanno,18 who argue that a focus on negative emotion needs
to be balanced by acknowledging the value of the expression of
positive emotion. It is suggested that this ability, along with the
ability to discover meaning in the loss, may be a better predictor
of long-term outcome. Tony Walters adds that meaning
reconstruction may come about through the construction of a
biography about the deceased in conversation with others,
including other grievers.
Although Didion enters into ‘‘conversation’’ with the
community of grievers and writers about grief through her
reading, she encounters the difficulty and depth of the task of
meaning-making: ‘‘I need to find more than words to find the
meaning.’’ To return full circle, this need to find more than
words and to go beyond potentially judgmental and reductive
theories is reflected in a later statement of Freud’s, who wrote
to a colleague on the death of his daughter Sophie, ‘‘Although
we know that after such a loss the acute state of mourning will
subside, we also know we shall remain inconsolable and will
never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if
it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else.
And actually, this is how it should be. It is the only way of
perpetuating that love which we do not want to relinquish.’’19 It
seems that, as both Freud and Joan Didion caution us, ‘‘Grief
turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach
it’’(Didion,1 p188).
Competing interests: None declared.
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J Med Ethics; Medical Humanities 2008;34:35–39. doi:10.1136/jmh.2008.000271 39

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The year of magical thinking: Joan Didion

and the dialectic of grief
F Brennan and M Dash

Med Humanities 2008 34: 35-39

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