My great uncle has been gone a few years and the grief keeps changing shape. I’m re-reading “The Year of Magical Thinking.” When he died, the first thing my brain reached for was a memory of being on a small boat in Quanzhou, Fujian, my uncle teaching me to hold a pencil while the water moved underneath us. Not the funeral. Not the last time I saw him. The boat.
That’s how grief moves. Not in stages. In sudden specifics.
Didion’s book moves the same way. She lurches from clinical psychiatric studies (Eric Lindemann, the 1942 Cocoanut Grove fire) to the sight of John’s shoes by the bed to a phone message to a medical form where the word “widow” stops her cold. Then she’s back in a memory of “planning meetings” at Michael’s in Santa Monica that were really just excuses for lunch. Then a quote from Gerard Manley Hopkins. Then the dictionary.
I used to read this as artful. It isn’t artful. It’s accurate.
I have ADHD. The way Didion’s attention behaves in this book, snagging on a detail, jumping a track, coming back to the same image four chapters later, is what my attention does on a regular Tuesday. The difference is she’s grieving and I’m just trying to answer email. When she writes that the bereaved “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,” I recognize that mode. The filter is off. Everything is signal.
Her journalist’s mind keeps trying to fix it. She reaches for research, for medical terminology, for case studies on widows in Champaign-Urbana. She quotes Lindemann at length. She intellectualizes. None of it holds. The structure of the book is her trying to impose order and the order keeps breaking down. That’s the whole architecture: failed scaffolding, visible.
The moment that stays with me is the dictionary. John always left it open on the table by the desk. One day she’s on the phone in his office, mindlessly turning the pages. Then she stops. “What word had he last looked up, what had he been thinking? By turning the pages had I lost the message? Or had the message been lost before I touched the dictionary? Had I refused to hear the message?”
Four questions. No answers. She doesn’t tidy it.
The other passage I keep coming back to: “Marriage is memory, marriage is time. Marriage is not only time: it is also, paradoxically, the denial of time. For forty years I saw myself through John’s eyes. I did not age.” For forty years she had a mirror that didn’t update. When he died, she saw herself through other people’s eyes for the first time since she was twenty-nine, and she looked older than she expected. The loss of John is also the loss of the version of herself he kept alive. Two losses, stacked.
She also writes about how the survivors look back and assemble omens. “They remember the tree that died, the gull that splattered onto the hood of the car.” This is the part where I had to put the book down. That’s the move. The retrofitting. The narrative we build after, where everything pointed at the thing. I catch myself doing this with my uncle. None of it was a sign. All of it feels like one.
What Didion is doing in this book, I think, is refusing to clean it up. She’s a journalist. She knows how to write a tidy piece. She doesn’t. She lets the file labeled “Planning” sit next to the autopsy report next to the Honolulu swim next to “Was there time to go back? Could we have a different ending on Pacific time?” The pieces don’t resolve into a thesis. The fact that they don’t resolve is the thesis.
Late in the book she catches herself making “simple errors of transcription, names and dates wrong” in her own work. Her whole identity is being right. Verifying facts. And now the facts won’t stay still. “Would I ever be right again? Could I ever again trust myself not to be wrong?”
I think this is why the book works on me now. It doesn’t tell you what grief is. It shows you what your brain does inside it. The looping. The over-attention to small things. The phone numbers taped by the telephone that aren’t there because you anticipated anything, they’re there because someone in the building might need an ambulance. The way the answering machine still plays his voice and you don’t retape it because retaping would mean something. The way nothing means enough and everything means too much, at the same time, on the same Tuesday.
My uncle taught me to hold a pencil on a boat in Quanzhou. I hadn’t thought about that boat in years. Now I can’t stop thinking about it. None of these details mean anything. All of them mean something.
That’s the book.