The Year of Magical Thinking

by Joan Didion

  Why, if those were my images of death, did I remain so unable to accept the fact that he had died? Was it because I was failing to understand it as something that had happened to him? Was it because I was still understanding it as something that had happened to me?

  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.

  You see how early the question of self-pity entered the picture.

  One morning during the spring after it happened I picked up The New York Times and skipped directly from the front page to the crossword puzzle, a way of starting the day that had become during those months a pattern, the way I had come to read, or more to the point not to read, the paper. I had never before had the patience to work crossword puzzles, but now imagined that the practice would encourage a return to constructive cognitive engagement. The clue that first got my attention that morning was 6 Down, “Sometimes you feel like…” I instantly saw the obvious answer, a good long one that would fill many spaces and prove my competency for the day: “a motherless child.”

  Motherless children have a real hard time—

  Motherless children have such a real hard time—

  No.

  6 Down had only four letters.

  I abandoned the puzzle (impatience died hard), and the next day looked up the answer. The correct answer for 6 Down was “anut.” “Anut?” A nut? Sometimes you feel like a nut? How far had I absented myself from the world of normal response?

  Notice: the answer most instantly accessed (“a motherless child”) was a wail of self-pity.

  This was not going to be an easy failure of understanding to correct.

  Avid its rush, that reeling blaze!

  Where is my father and Eleanor?

  Not where are they now, dead seven years,

  But what they were then?

  No more? No more?

  —DELMORE SCHWARTZ,

  “Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day”

  He believed he was dying. He told me so, repeatedly. I dismissed this. He was depressed. He had finished a novel, Nothing Lost, which was caught in the predictable limbo of a prolonged period between delivery and publication, and he was undergoing an equally predictable crisis of confidence about the book he was then beginning, a reflection on the meaning of patriotism that had not yet found its momentum. He had been dealing as well through most of the year with a series of enervating medical issues. His cardiac rhythm had been slipping with increasing frequency into atrial fibrillation. A normal sinus rhythm could be restored by cardioversion, an outpatient procedure in which he was given general anesthesia for a few minutes while his heart was electrically shocked, but a change in physical status as slight as catching a cold or taking a long plane flight could again disrupt the rhythm. His last such procedure, in April 2003, had required not one but two shocks. The steadily increasing frequency with which cardioversion had become necessary indicated that it was no longer a useful option. In June, after a series of consultations, he had undergone a more radical cardiac intervention, a radio-frequency ablation of the atrial-ventricular node and the subsequent implantation of the Medtronic Kappa 900 SR pacemaker.

  During the course of the summer, buoyed by the pleasure of Quintana’s wedding and by the apparent success of the pacemaker, his mood had seemed to lift. In the fall it dropped again. I recall a fight over the question of whether we should go to Paris in November. I did not want to go. I said we had too much to do and too little money. He said he had a sense that if he did not go to Paris in November he would never again go to Paris. I interpreted this as blackmail. That settles it then, I said, we’re going. He left the table. We did not speak in any meaningful way for two days.

  In the end we went to Paris in November.

  I tell you that I shall not live two days, Gawain said.

  A few weeks ago at the Council on Foreign Relations at Sixty-eighth and Park I noticed someone across from me reading the International Herald Tribune. One more example of slipping onto the incorrect track: I am no longer at the Council on Foreign Relations at Sixty-eighth and Park but sitting across from John at breakfast in the dining room of the Bristol in Paris in November 2003. We are each reading the International Herald Tribune, hotel copies, with little stapled cards showing the weather for the day. The cards for each of those November mornings in Paris showed an umbrella icon. We walked in the rain at the Jardin du Luxembourg. We escaped from the rain into St. Sulpice. There was a mass in progress. John took communion. 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 plane began leveling.

  He always did.

  Where did that go?

  In a magazine I see a Microsoft advertisement that shows the platform of the Porte des Lilas metro station in Paris.

  I found yesterday in the pocket of an unworn jacket a used metro ticket from that November trip to Paris. “Only Episcopalians ‘take’ communion,” he had corrected me one last time as we left St. Sulpice. He had been correcting me on this point for forty years. Episcopalians “took,” Catholics “received.” It was, he explained each time, a difference in attitude.

  Not where are they now, dead seven years,

  But what they were then?

  That last cardioversion: April 2003. The one that had required two shocks. I remember a doctor explaining why it was done under anesthesia. “Because otherwise they jump off the table,” he said. December 30, 2003: the sudden jump when the ambulance crew was using the defibrillating paddles on the living room floor. Was that ever a heartbeat or was it just electricity?

  The night he died or the night before, in the taxi between Beth Israel North and our apartment, he said several things that for the first time made me unable to readily dismiss his mood as depression, a normal phase of any writer’s life.

  Everything he had done, he said, was worthless.

  I still tried to dismiss it.

  This might not be normal, I told myself, but neither was the condition in which we had just left Quintana.

  He said that the novel was worthless.

  This might not be normal, I told myself, but neither was it normal for a father to see a child beyond his help.

  He said that his current piece in The New York Review, a review of Gavin Lambert’s biography of Natalie Wood, was worthless.

  This might not be normal, but what in the past several days had been?

  He said he did not know what he was doing in New York. “Why did I waste time on a piece about Natalie Wood,” he said.

  It was not a question.

  “You were right about Hawaii,” he said then.

  He may have meant that I had been right a day or so before when I said that when Quintana got better (this was our code for “if she lives”) we could rent a house on the Kailua beach and she could recuperate there. Or he may have meant that I had been right in the 1970s when I wanted to buy a house in Honolulu. I preferred at the time to think the former but the past tense suggested the latter. He said these things in the taxi between Beth Israel North and our apartment either three hours before he died or twenty-seven hours before he died, I try to remember which and cannot.

  7.

  Why did I keep stressing what was and was not normal, when nothing about it was?

  Let me try a chronology here.

  Quintana was admitted to the ICU at Beth Israel North on December 25, 2003.

  John died on December 30, 2003.

  I told Quintana that he was dead late on the morning of January 15, 2004, in the ICU at Beth Israel North, after the doctors had managed to remove the breathing tube and reduce sedation to a point at which she could gradually wake up. Telling her that day had not been the plan. The doctors had said that she would wake only intermittently, at first partially, and for a matter of days be able to absorb only limited
information. If she woke and saw me she would wonder where her father was. Gerry and Tony and I had discussed this problem at length. We had decided that only Gerry should be with her when she first began to wake. She could focus on him, on their life together. The question of her father might not come up. I could see her later, maybe days later. I could tell her then. She would be stronger.

  As planned, Gerry was with her when she first woke. As not planned, a nurse told her that her mother was outside in the corridor.

  Then when is she coming in, she wanted to know.

  I went in.

  “Where’s Dad,” she whispered when she saw me.

  Because three weeks of intubation had inflamed her vocal cords, even her whisper was barely audible. I told her what had happened. I stressed the history of cardiac problems, the long run of luck that had finally caught up with us, the apparent suddenness but actual inevitability of the event. She cried. Gerry and I each held her. She dropped back into sleep.

  “How’s Dad,” she whispered when I saw her that evening.

  I began again. The heart attack. The history. The apparent suddenness of the event.

  “But how is he now,” she whispered, straining to be audible.

  She had absorbed the sudden event part but not the outcome.

  I told her again. In the end I would have to tell her a third time, in another ICU, this one at UCLA.

  The chronology.

  On January 19, 2004, she was moved from the sixth-floor ICU at Beth Israel North to a room on the twelfth floor. On January 22, 2004, still too weak to stand or sit unsupported and running a fever from a hospital infection acquired in the ICU, she was discharged from Beth Israel North. Gerry and I put her to bed in her old room in my apartment. Gerry went out to fill the prescriptions she had been given. She got out of bed to get another quilt from the closet and collapsed on the floor. I could not lift her and needed to get someone from the building to put her back to bed.

  On the morning of January 25, 2004, she woke, still in my apartment, with severe chest pain and increasing fever. She was admitted that day to the Milstein Hospital at Columbia-Presbyterian after a diagnosis of pulmonary emboli was reached in the Presbyterian emergency room. Given her prolonged immobility at Beth Israel, I know now but did not know then, this was an entirely predictable development that could have been diagnosed before discharge from Beth Israel by the same imaging that was done three days later in the Presbyterian emergency room. After she was admitted to Milstein her legs were imaged to see if further clots had formed. She was placed on anticoagulants to prevent such further formation while the existing clots were allowed to dissolve.

  On February 3, 2004, she was discharged from Presbyterian, still on anticoagulants. She began physical therapy to regain strength and mobility. Together, with Tony and Nick, she and I planned the service for John. The service took place at four o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon, March 23, 2004, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where, at three o’clock in the presence of the family, John’s ashes had been placed as planned in the chapel off the main altar. After the service Nick had arranged a reception at the Union Club. Eventually thirty or forty members of the family made their way back to John’s and my apartment. I lit a fire. We had drinks. We had dinner. Quintana, although still fragile, had stood up in her black dress at the Cathedral and laughed with her cousins at dinner. On the morning of March 25, a day and a half later, she and Gerry were going to restart their life by flying to California and walking on the beach at Malibu for a few days. I had encouraged this. I wanted to see Malibu color on her face and hair again.

  The next day, March 24, alone in the apartment, the obligation to bury my husband and see our daughter through her crisis formally fulfilled, I put away the plates and allowed myself to think for the first time about what would be required to restart my own life. I called Quintana to wish her a good trip. She was flying early the next morning. She sounded anxious. She was always anxious before a trip. Decisions about what to pack had seemed since childhood to trigger some fear of lost organization. Do you think I’ll be okay in California, she said. I said yes. Definitely she would be okay in California. Going to California would in fact be the first day of the rest of her life. It occurred to me as I hung up that cleaning my office could be a step toward the first day of the rest of my own life. I began doing this. During most of the following day, Thursday, March 25, I continued doing this. At points during the quiet day I found myself thinking that possibly I had come through into a new season. In January I had watched ice floes form on the East River from a window at Beth Israel North. In February I had watched ice floes break up on the Hudson from a window at Columbia-Presbyterian. Now in March the ice was gone and I had done what I had to do for John and Quintana would come back from California restored. As the afternoon progressed (her plane would have landed, she would have picked up a car and driven up the Pacific Coast Highway) I imagined her already walking on the beach with Gerry in the thin March Malibu sunlight. I typed the Malibu zip code, 90265, into AccuWeather. There was sun, a high and low I do not remember but do remember thinking satisfactory, a good day in Malibu.

  There would be wild mustard on the hills.

  She could take him to see the orchids at Zuma Canyon.

  She could take him to eat fried fish at the Ventura County line.

  She had arranged to take him to lunch one day at Jean Moore’s, she would be in the places in which she had spent her childhood. She could show him where we had gathered mussels for Easter lunch. She could show him where the butterflies were, where she had learned to play tennis, where she had learned from the Zuma Beach lifeguards how to swim out of a riptide. On the desk in my office there was a photograph taken when she was seven or eight, her hair long and blonde from the Malibu sun. Stuck in the back of the frame there was a crayoned note, left one day on the kitchen counter in Malibu: Dear Mom, when you opened the door it was me who ran away XXXXXX—Q.

  At ten minutes past seven that evening I was changing to go downstairs, for dinner with friends who live in the building. I say “at ten minutes past seven” because that was when the phone rang. It was Tony. He said he was coming right over. I noted the time because I was due downstairs at seven-thirty but Tony’s urgency was such that I did not say so. His wife, Rosemary Breslin, had spent the past fifteen years dealing with an undiagnosable blood disorder. Since shortly after John died she had been on an experimental protocol that had left her increasingly weak and required intermittent hospitalization at Memorial Sloan-Kettering. I knew that the long day at the Cathedral and later with the family had been strenuous for her. I stopped Tony as he was about to hang up. I asked if Rosemary was back in the hospital. He said it was not Rosemary. It was Quintana, who, even as we spoke, at ten minutes past seven in New York and ten minutes past four in California, was undergoing emergency neurosurgery at UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles.

  8.

  They had gotten off the plane.

  They had picked up their shared bag.

  Gerry was carrying the bag to the car rental shuttle, crossing the arrivals driveway ahead of Quintana. He looked back. Even today I have no idea what made him look back. I never thought to ask. I pictured it as one more case in which you heard someone talking and then you didn’t, so you looked. Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant. She was lying on her back on the asphalt. An ambulance was called. She was taken to UCLA. According to Gerry she was awake and lucid in the ambulance. It was only in the emergency room that she began convulsing and lost coherence. A surgical team was alerted. A CT scan was done. By the time they took her into surgery one of her pupils was fixed. The other became fixed as they wheeled her in. I would be told this more than once, in each case as evidence of the gravity of the condition and the critical nature of the intervention: “One pupil was fixed and the other went as we wheeled her in.”

  The first time I heard this I did not know the significance of what I was being told. By the second time I did. S
herwin B. Nuland, in How We Die, described having seen, as a third-year medical student, a cardiac patient whose “pupils were fixed in the position of wide black dilatation that signifies brain death, and obviously would never respond to light again.” Again in How We Die, Dr. Nuland described the failing attempts of a CPR team to revive a patient who had suffered cardiac arrest in the hospital: “The tenacious young men and women see their patient’s pupils become unresponsive to light and then widen until they are large fixed circles of impenetrable blackness. Reluctantly the team stops its efforts…. The room is strewn with the debris of the lost campaign.” Was this what the New York–Presbyterian ambulance crew saw in John’s eyes on our living room floor on December 30, 2003? Was this what the UCLA neurosurgeons saw in Quintana’s eyes on March 25, 2004? “Impenetrable blackness?” “Brain death?” Was that what they thought? I look at a printout of that day’s CT report from UCLA and still go faint:

  The scan shows right hemispheric subdural hematoma, with evidence of acute bleeding. Active bleeding cannot be excluded. The hematoma causes marked mass effect upon the right cerebrum, subfalcial and early uncal herniation, with 19 mm of midline shift from right to left at the level of the third ventricle. The right lateral ventricle is subtotally effaced and the left lateral ventricle shows early entrapment. There is moderate to marked midbrain compression and the perimesencephalic cistern is effaced. A thin posterior falcine and left tentorial subdural hematomas are noted. A small parenchymal bleed, likely contusional, is noted in the right inferolateral frontal lobe. The cerebellar tonsils are at the level of the foramen magnum. There is no skull fracture. There is a large right parietal scalp hematoma.