ON RADICAL HONESTY
‘We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
E.M. Forster
It was with a heightened sense of inevitability that I realised I would not be able to follow Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking with anything other than Blue Nights. When I go to pick it up at the bookshop where I have ordered it, the young man behind the counter remarks with a grim smile, ‘Looks like you’re in for a gruelling read.’ I snap back at him, ‘She lost a child and I did too!’. Moments later I bitterly regret my response as he confusedly mumbles something about seeking solace. Anger. Guilt. Shame. Usually in that order. None of them so very far from the surface these days.
As I open its pages and begin to read, it is almost as if I was destined never to have really known Didion’s work until this point. I am and have always been a voracious reader of women’s writing. How, I wonder, did her books slip off my reading lists? Was it to do with her class, her politics, the disturbing visual elision I have created between her and Vogue editor Anna Wintour? Or simply an aversion to reading texts that felt so full of stories of people whose names we mostly know through gossip columns in the popular press that it felt as if she was teasingly offering us a seductive, but transient, insight into worlds from which we knew we were indelibly excluded?
Perhaps it was all of these. Yet somehow here we are. Joan and me (We even share a name although that is a different story). And it is almost as if we are sitting in each other’s company. Me learning, as the book unfolds, how our lives have crossed in the strangest and darkest of ways. Losing a child. Losing a husband. Losing our sense of who we are within all this. I even find myself exclaiming out loud, as she writes of the sudden death of her young friend, Natasha Richardson, that I had forgotten that moment when Corin Redgrave, her uncle, shared the news of her death with us. And how unimaginable and unspeakably cruel such a loss had seemed at that time. ‘This was never supposed to have happened to her‘ Didion repeats the words she uses of her own daughters’ death four years earlier, like a Greek chorus.,‘This was never supposed to have happened to her’. And all I can do is silently agree. This was never supposed to have happened to any of our children. It was never supposed to happen to any parent. Those blue summer nights were intended to last forever.
But this did happen. It does happen. Joan, Vanessa and I are not alone. Quintana is gone. Natasha is gone. Jamie is gone. Endless children are gone in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, Sudan – killed in conflicts for which we, as humanity, must all take some responsibility. Endless mothers, and fathers thinking ‘this was never supposed to happen’. Endless excuses being created by mainstream politicians and media for the savage loss of humanity that makes the targeted killing of children and the unbearable suffering of their parents somehow acceptable. And those of us who have known that loss filled with endless guilt and shame that we were unable to save them. Anger. Guilt. Shame. Usually in that order. Never far from the surface these days.
But Blue Nights is not only about loss.. It is also about the complex and contradictory ways in which we find ourselves coming to terms with and facing that loss. What my one-sided conversations with Didion and her books have taught me (note how briefly I felt able to call her Joan) is how important writing can be as a way of facing the unfaceable. From defining the impact of that cruel instant in which death changes everything to confronting the equally relentless and complicated fears that follow, Didion is ruthlessly and radically honest. Not only about her sense of memories fading away like the blue nights, and her child disappearing into the ‘nothingness’ she has always feared but also of the dread of the curtailing of the possible and a foreshortening of the horizon that age and such losses can bring. Her confession that she is terrified becoming seventy five might be some form of cut-off point, despite discovering the ever youthful Sophia Loren is the same age, her acknowledgement that she cares about the physical impacts of ageing more than she might have anticipated, is increasingly afraid of falling and terrified of not remembering feels palpably brave. Our sense of our own mortality, as she reminds us, is inextricably caught up with those fears we have for our children from the moment they are born. Faced with their loss it as if those fears turn in on ourselves, forcing us to focus on our own vulnerability and frailty.
It was five years before Didion felt able to write about the death of Quintana. ‘Time’, as Didion notes ‘passes‘. While her presence, whether hurrying off to school in her plaid school uniform, wearing leis and red soled Christian Louboutin shoes at her wedding, or wrapped in ICU hospital gowns flits vividly through the pages with the luminosity of a firefly it is difficult to have a complete sense of her. It is as if in accepting the chaotic and fragmented way that memories arrive Didion has been prepared to let go of the precision, neatness and almost musical accuracy that characterises so much of her writing. She even allows herself to voice her doubts that she still has the capacity to write,; while seeking possibilities to continually prove she is wrong.
It is this hotchpotch of resistance, resilience and acceptance that moves me more than anything and it is this, along with her unadorned sharing of the questioning, doubts and fears that assail her after Quintana’s death, that I determine to take away from Blue Nights. I suspect I will also find myself returning to the mantra she creates for to protect herself from wallowing in self pity,. Unnervingly redolent of the credo by which my own mother, toughened by her own hardships, encouraged us to live our lives, it already feels a fit:
‘Do not whine … Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.’
Postscript.
On the night of Jamie’s cremation in Mexico I asked family and friends to light a candle to see him on his journey. The beautiful one I have shared above is that of his sister-in-law Masya and her boyfriend. The other day I finally put the photographs of the candles people sent on the website I created to share the service with those who couldn’t attend. Small steps. A way of marking that passing of time. A kind of letting go.
Two weeks after Jamie’s death we held a memorial service in a beautiful Wren church. We read Maya Angelou’s When Great Trees Fall, a young cellist friend played St Saëns The Swan, one of Steve’s young opera singers sang One Fine Day from Madame Butterfly and each of us in turn placed white flowers on the altar. A flower seller by London Bridge asked if something special was happening because so many people had asked for white flowers that morning. Friends of his and ours we hadn’t seen for years suddenly appeared on boats and trains from Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin and beyond. Later we shared stories, drank prosecco and, as so often seems to happen at funerals and memorials, laughed a lot.
Two months later I took the viva for my PhD. I asked that they didn’t tell the external examiner what had happened. I was afraid she might pass me out of pity. I unexpectedly loved our conversation, feeling suddenly present, alive and listened to in the most perfect of ways. Afterwards, as I waited in a soulless university room for the verdict, I wept. One of my examiners gave me a pin I had admired that said Free Palestine in Irish. Both gave me a hug.
Since then I find myself so often wanting to care for the person I am speaking to and to follow Didion’s mantra that I resist the tears. I cried out once while waiting for a plane the first time we went back to Berlin, where Jamie lived. Everyone, apart for a woman who was a nurse who came and instinctively held me, was terrified. Later the staff took me to one side before we boarded to ask if they should allow me on the plane as they were worried for their other customers. I promised to stay silent.
Post postscript.
This week the 11th edition of Record magazine, an annual publication, came out. because it had not been published for two years, it had the final interview Jamie ever did. Discovering there was a magazine shop that stocked it locally I took a walk to buy a copy. Reading through the pages, of which I had seen an earlier version, I realised they had decided to leave all the little conversational fillers like the use of ‘like’ in and wanting to change that. I remembered then how often Jamie had sent me things he had written for the vinyl label or press releases to check whether it said what he wanted to say and if there were any mistakes. I also remembered Didion finding an old journal of Quintana’s after her death and finding herself ‘appallingly’ mentally correcting the sentences.
Afterwards, sitting in a nearby Japanese café, a young woman came up to me to ask if I’d just bought the magazine because she worked in the shop. I explained why I wanted a copy and found myself telling her everything about Jamie and his life. She thought he sounded so similar to her own partner in the way he tried to realise his passions for music and art and wine and good food in his work. I told her about wanting to take out all the ‘like’s and we laughed about it being the kind of thing mothers never get out of the habit of doing. She promised to read the interview and I promised to revisit what had turned out to be an amazing store. We exchanged names before we left. She was called Emelia.
On the way home Blanche Dubois’ final line comes into my mind..
‘Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.’
