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Joan Didion wrote the book The Year of Magical Thinking after his husband sudden death, in 2003. 
Joan Didion wrote the book The Year of Magical Thinking after his husband sudden death, in 2003. 

The Message of Joan Didion: Grieve Retrieves Memories, and that's OK.

Joan Didion wrote the book The Year of Magical Thinking after his husband sudden death, in 2003. The author, an acclaimed reporter, reflects on Marriage, Grief…

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“This will not be the story in which the death of the husband or wife becomes what amounts to the credit sequence for a new life, a catalyst for the discovery that “you can love more than one person”. Of course you can, but marriage is something different. Marriage is memory, marriage is time.”

Although these words sound like the beginning of a book, they belong to the final pages of The Year of Magical Thinking, a book Joan Didion wrote after the death of his husband, on December 2003.

A well-known author and reporter from the New Yorker, Joan decided to write this book as a way to understand the unexpected death of his husband and think about how important marriage was for her.

“We were equally incapable of imaging the reality of life without the other”, she writes. His husband, John Dunne, was also a writer. They were both from California but lived in New York, to be closer to the publishing industry. They had an apartment with a fireplace, so they could light a fire, like they used to do in California. Every morning they went for a walk in Central Park. They went to the dentist together. They did almost everything together. “Because we were both writers and both worked at home, our days were filled with the sound of each other’s voices,” Joan remembers. 

Because that’s what Joan Didion does really well. Remembering, collecting memories. Reconstructing, with journalistic tenacity- step by step, detail by detail- every single moment since John suddenly died. The thorough compilation of facts help her to comprehend that she couldn’t have done anything to save him. John died of a heart dysfunction minutes before they were going to have dinner at their apartment. They had just came back from the hospital, where her only daughter, Quintana, was in the UCI, recovering from a complicated pneumonia (she died six months later).  It was a cold December night, Joan recalls. They had lit a fire, John went to the living room to read, with a Scotch in hand. Joan went to the kitchen to make a salad. Minutes later, John was dead. It was so sudden she first thought it was a joke. “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity”, were the first words she wrote after it happened.

It is not easy to accept the loss of a beloved one, and Joan provides no solution to end with the suffering, except sharing it with us. She wants us to now that remembering the love for his dead husband keeps her sane. Loving someone, taking care of someone, will keep us sane after he or she dies. Didion seems to have no regrets. She doesn’t cry for the things she didn’t  tell him. She doesn’t express being sorry for that day she was mad at him or insulted him, or for all those things John won’t be able to do anymore. Joan seems only to be exploring self-pity. “Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grieve comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life”.

The dailiness of life as she understood it for 40 years is over. In the book, Didion tries to recall simple daily moments with his husband. Memories bring John back to life in in her mind. She remembers a recent trip to Paris. With a basic description– free of adjectives and explosions of feelings – the author finds a way to express how much she misses his husband: “We caught cold in the rain at the Jardin du Ranelagh. On the flight back to New York John’s muffler and my jersey dress smelled of wet wool. On takeoff he held my hand until the plan began levelling. He always did.”

Amid this era of superficiality and immediateness, in which it has become cool to say we are not interested in commitment or serious relationships (as if the fact of marrying someone meant to be missing a lot of supposedly interesting opportunities), Joan Didion gives us a life lesson:  a marriage with real love is possible, only if both parts are willing to love and respect each other. And yes, when one of them dies, the price to pay will be high. But it’s was worth, Didion concludes.

“Marriage is not only time: marriage is, paradoxically, the denial of time. For forty years I saw myself through John’s eyes. I did not age. This year for the first time since I was twenty nine I saw myself through the eyes of others”. 

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