Book Review
Black Magic
By Charles R. Meyer, M.D.
Returning to their Manhattan apartment in December of 2003 after visiting their daughter who was hospitalized with severe pneumonia, novelist Joan Didion and her husband, novelist John Gregory Dunne, sat down for an ordinary dinner. The ordinary turned cataclysmic as Dunne collapsed, 911 was summoned, and Dunne was pronounced DOA at the emergency room. Didion’s grief odyssey, poetically chronicled in her book The Year of Magical Thinking, started when she returned to the apartment after her husband’s unsuccessful resuscitation.
That night she wrote the phrase “ordinary instant” on a piece of paper and later analyzed those words: “I saw immediately that there would be no need to add the word ‘ordinary’ because there would be no forgetting it: the word never left my mind. 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. … confronted with sudden disaster, we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine errand that ended on the shoulder with the car in flames, the swings where the children were playing as usual when the rattlesnake struck from the ivy.” In an instant, grief had invaded her world.
Captured by disbelief, trying to reconcile the commonplace with the catastrophic, Didion sees the events of Dunne’s death turn fantastical. She tried to will her husband back, expecting him to need the shoes she refused to throw away. Her thoughts took her far from her usual rational world of letters and reviews. She writes, “I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome.” Like a primitive, she reinterpreted the past, assigning meanings to random events. “Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed. They remember the tree that died, the gull that splattered onto the hood of the car. They live by symbols. They read meaning into the barrage of spam on the unused computer, the delete key that stops working, the imagined abandonment in the decision to replace it.” And she engages in a “what if” remaking of history, repainting a past in which her husband still lived and their lives continued as before.
Didion’s grief journey was exceptional. A woman of words, she sought solace in poetry and literature, invoking Auden, Lawrence, and C.S. Lewis. A victim of double disasters, she suffered overlapping grief when her daughter died less than a year after her husband. Yet her story speaks to all of us. She taps the self-absorption of mourning, the all-consuming, isolating self-pity and recurring interior monologues. She describes the intrusiveness of grief as “paroxysms” that crash like “waves” into daily existence.
Didion does reach a peace by the end of her book, emerging from her magical thoughts to confront the reality of her loss. “I know why we try to keep the dead alive,” she writes. “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. Let them become the photograph on the table. Let them become the name on the trust accounts. Let go of them in the water. Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of him in the water.”
Grief will never be easy. But Didion’s lyrical sharing of her own journey tells us what we might expect when we lose someone. Don’t confront death without this book. MM
Charles Meyer is editor in chief of Minnesota Medicine.