You could try reading Joan Didion's recent book The Year of Magical Thinking, which is her unsentimental reflection on losing her life-long partner, John Gregory Dunne, while, at the same time, her 40-yr old daughter was in and out of the hospital with pneumonia and septicemia and other complications. (Sadly, her daughter also died about two weeks after the book MS was sent to the publishers. Didion chose not to revise the book at all at that point, however, so for readers who are aware of that second death, it kind of hangs over the book, like a ghost.)
Here are some of her words:
"This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed [her daughter's Christmas day illness and her husbands death a week later], weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself. I have been a writer my entire life. As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself."
...
"Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes. . . . Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself."
...
Thinking of Persephone's words, I find Didion's emphasis on the relentlessly anti-narrative effect of grief, the way deep grief resists meaning, resists narration. I wonder, too, if the narratability of the grief is helped by some level of normalcy of sequence--we know our parents are likely to die before us; the death of a child can be absolutely devastating to people partly because it is so out of sequence of our expectations...
As one of the reviews puts it, Didion's book is more of a "case study" of mourning, than a how-to/ self help book, but I would think that hearing the voice of someone else who knows grief deeply and intimately might be companionable during one's own grieving. |
