That Joan Didion Book

 Around the time I first started getting rid of the books, I sent my niece a box of Joan Didion, including The Year of Magical Thinking.  Just days after I sent a box of 12 books on UPS to Los Angeles, I received a copy of that famous book from my friend Lee.

I finally started reading it last week when I was at the Oxford avoiding being in the house while the floors were off-gassing.  (Sadly, they're still stinking a bit so I plan to stay downstairs until I can no longer smell them.)  It turns out one chapter was helpful but so much of the rest of it is about Joan's pain and the terrible illness of her daughter that I just can't read it.  I don't have the strength right now to hold other people's pain as well as my own.  

Although it IS helpful to know that a rich, sophisticated writer was so fucked up by grief that she kept thinking her spouse wasn't dead.  And, just now as I'm writing this, I stopped and opened randomly and found pp. 192-3 where she talks about self-pity.

“People in grief think a great deal about self-pity. We worry it, dread it, scourge our thinking for signs of it. We fear that our actions will reveal the condition tellingly described as 'dwelling on it.' . . . We remind ourselves repeatedly that our own loss is nothing compared to the loss experienced (or, the even worse thought, not experienced) by he or she who died; this attempt at corrective thinking serves only to plunge us deeper into the self-regarding deep. (Why didn’t I see that, why am I so selfish.) The very language we use when we think about self-pity betrays the deep abhorrence in which we hold it: self-pity is feeling sorry for yourself, self-pity is thumb-sucking, self-pity is boo hoo poor me, self-pity is the condition in which those feeling sorry for themselves indulge, or even wallow. Self-pity remains both the most common and the most universally reviled of our character defects, its pestilential destructiveness accepted as given…In fact the grieving have urgent reasons, even an urgent need, to feel sorry for themselves. Husbands walk out, wives walk out, divorces happen, but these husbands and wives leave behind them webs of intact associations, however acrimonious. Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone.” 

 

 This aloneness after 50 years is proving tougher than I imagined.  The grief became worse through April than it had been in January.  My friend Lilli Ann says that this is because in January I was in shock and now I'm actually grieving.  I'm also doing my best to sober up from weed.  The trouble with not being high all day is that I'm sad all day.  So I'm crying every fucking day.  And, yes, I'm drinking more water to replace fluids.

And Didion was so right when she comments somewhere in the book (I lost the place) about the idiocy of the comment, "You'll always have your memories" as though that somehow makes things okay.  First of all, memories aren't people.  A memory isn't a warm body that speaks.  And for me, there's also the issue that my own brain is damaged in such a way that I don't carry a lot of my experiences.  Because of a childhood of hypervigilance, three concussions, drinking to blackout in youth, and excessive weed usage, my ability to recall specificities of my life is limited.  It was Will's job to remember many of our adventures.

And now, the adventures I remember have lost the one person with whom I could recall them.  The little jokes we had.  The references.  Of course these were gone by the last year of his life but he was still there where I could hug him.  And I held him every day.  And the day before he went into his death coma he smiled at me with love in his old eyes and told me he loved me. 

I am glad he died when he did (he started his death coma on Christmas, like it was a present from the universe).  

And I miss him so very much.