The first flowers of a rose called ‘At Peace’ that I bought because of its name. A small memorial to Jamie.
‘Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it …’
Joan Didion
Joan Didion’s response to the grief of losing her husband of forty years The Year of Magical Thinking is the one book from my small birthday library I have now read all the way through. The privileged, even rarefied, life which Didion and her husband John Dunne enjoyed which she chronicles so elegantly can make it a complex and sometimes difficult read. Yet as she begins to write with such precision about John’s death, wondering constantly if it could have been prevented, whether anything the medics, the doctors, she herself did in response to his heart attack could have produced different outcomes it is impossible not to be drawn in by the rawness of her grief and her attempts to have some form of control. When she shares the detailed autopsy report which she receives almost a year later, having written down an old address in the urgency of needing to respond at the hospital, it is a final reassurance. He is gone and there is nothing she could have done to prevent it.
I recognise so many of the feelings she shares of not being able to believe someone has gone from our lives. Of wanting to believe it might somehow all be reversible. The endless attempts at magical thinking. If only I had done this … said that. If only I had remembered to think about warning of the dangers of swimming in the sea as well as needing to be careful travelling around Mexico City. The ‘fast’ and cruel ways in which ‘life changes in an instant’. A phone-call in the middle of the night. A silent scream. Mother Courage Loses a Son. Like Didion I feel the need to turn to the literature. Not for the medical knowledge she is often seeking, there is no explanation for an accident of nature, but to find that writer, or writers, who will have captured everything I am feeling but more eloquently, more poetically, in ways that might make sense of my emotions. Or more possibly to find a way to share with those who have not known, and may never know, the grief beyond grief that losing a child can bring. Even now it is as if sharing Didion’s words are the impulse that has given me permission to speak of my own grief.
Not only for the loss of my son, but the understanding that, as she speaks about the death of the man who has been her partner in life for over forty years, it is often as if she is describing the anticipatory grief I am coming to know. The slow, scary shifting of the land beneath our feet that losing someone to a degenerative brain disease involves. And the understanding that, as we mourn the loss of the person that was are also mourning ‘for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer.’
I have hardly begun Blue Nights – the book that opens on July 26, 2010, which should have been the seventh wedding anniversary of her daughter Quintana and instead marks almost five years since her death. When I went to pick it up at the bookshop where I had ordered it the lovely young man at the counter said ‘Looks like you’re going to have a gruelling read.’ I went home feeling terribly guilty that I’d snapped back at him, ‘She lost a child and I did too’. Anger. Guilt. Shame.
