The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  She stood absolutely still, wondering what to do.

  She made calls to the family. Gerry offered to come right over, but she said there was no need. Her brother Jim would fly out from California the next day. Somehow, Lynn Nesbit got the news, apparently from someone Nick had called, and arrived to see what she could do. Didion was both rattled and relieved by her presence. Nesbit was swiftly competent and would know what matters needed tending. She said she would call Christopher Lehmann-Haupt about placing an obituary in the papers.

  According to Didion, “magical thinking” is an elaborate form of denial, sometimes indistinguishable from dementia.

  For example, to announce Dunne’s death publicly in an obituary would be to officially sanction and ensure his death, thus barring him from returning.

  In the year ahead, Didion would find numerous occasions on which to practice her magic.

  Case in point: It was fine to okay an autopsy, because an autopsy would determine the cause of death, which could then be reversed.

  She could not throw away his shoes, because he was going to need them when he came back.

  Nesbit offered to stay the night, but Didion said she’d be all right alone. She wrote that, the following morning when she awoke, she wondered for a moment why the other half of the bed was empty, and she experienced the same sort of “leaden” feeling enveloping her as she had after she and Dunne had fought.

  Nick, Tony Dunne, and Rosemary Breslin accompanied her to the Frank E. Campbell funeral home to identify the body. This was the funeral home Dunne used to pop by in the fifties to see if anybody famous had died, back in the days when he was first courting Didion. The bruises on his face were no longer apparent: the undertaker’s form of magical thinking.

  The obituary in The New York Times read: “Mr. Dunne and Ms. Didion were probably America’s best known writing couple”—as though she had died with him. They “were anointed as the First Family of Angst by The Saturday Review in 1982 for their unflinching explorations of the national soul, or often, the glaring lack of one.”

  Of course, he had been felled by the massive coronary he had always expected.

  “I knew he had heart trouble. It wasn’t a secret. He was always having something done to his heart. Anyone else could have figured out in a flash that he’d die from it. But it came as a surprise to me. That was my fault,” Didion said.

  “I couldn’t help drawing a line from Q’s condition to John’s heart attack,” said Sean Michael. “The jeopardy relayed daily by doctors with different diagnoses and different prognoses of recovery … it was too stressful on John.”

  As Didion was leaving the funeral home that day, her nephew Tony remarked to the undertaker that a clock in the main office, where they’d had to sign some papers, wasn’t running. The undertaker replied in a rather mysteriously self-satisfied way that the clock hadn’t run in many years.

  3

  Nearly three weeks after she’d been admitted to the ICU, Quintana was able to breathe without the aid of the breathing tube. Doctors decided to reduce the sedation so she could gradually awake. They advised Didion not to overload her with information in the first few days, as she would be intermittently and partially conscious, capable of absorbing only so much. The plan was for Gerry to be present with her when she opened her eyes. If she saw her mother, she’d wonder where her father was.

  Quintana had other plans. On January 15, 2004, when she awoke, she learned from a nurse that Didion was sitting in a hallway just outside the room. “Then when is she coming in?” Quintana asked.

  Didion approached her bed. “Where’s Dad?” Quintana asked, her voice a raw whisper.

  As calmly as she could, Didion told her what had happened, composing a narrative with the magical implication that, given her father’s medical history, this was the way it was supposed to go. Quintana cried. Didion and Gerry held her until she dropped off to sleep again.

  That evening, Quintana opened her eyes. “How’s Dad?” she whispered.

  Once more, Didion described the heart attack.

  Quintana strained to make her voice louder. “But how is he now?”

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  1

  Didion had been grieving, but she had not been able to mourn, to mark her husband’s passing ceremonially so as to give it diurnal heft, the community’s blessing. She’d had Dunne cremated, but she wanted to wait until Quintana had been released from the hospital before holding a memorial service. Closure was not the goal of the service. She did not believe in closure. The service was the celebration of a life. The lighting of a candle. One last chance, with some form of her husband’s presence, to listen to Gregorian chant, a ritual he had always loved.

  Grief was another matter entirely. Grief was a type of solitude. It was impolite to burden others with your grief too much or for too long. They expected you to “get over it in time”—for their sakes, if not for yours. She found herself standing alone in her kitchen, in the blue twilight, eating at the counter. At first, congee from Chinatown was all she could keep down. Calvin Trillin brought it to her; he seemed to be the one friend who knew how to help her grieve. He understood. He had lost his wife. She told him she wasn’t hungry; he said he knew but that the body needed sustenance. He left the congee and withdrew.

  Always go to the text. That had been her default position, but the books she glanced at now, from the cheesiest self-help manuals recommended by friends to more nuanced accounts of psychology to academic studies of behavior, struck her as hollow. They failed to help her cope with what she was feeling. Only a copy of Emily Post’s 1922 book on etiquette—which her mother had first showed her when they were snowbound together near the army base in Colorado Springs—soothed her, with its matter-of-fact approach to social necessities and social decorum, and its straightforward practicality: A “sunny room,” preferably next to a fire, is the ideal spot for the bereaved; “[c]old milk is bad for someone who is already over-chilled.”

  She’d discovered she’d stopped dreaming. “Don’t tell me your dream,” Dunne used to say to her in the mornings, but he’d always end up listening to her.

  * * *

  On January 22, 2004, Beth Israel North discharged Quintana. She was running a fever from an infection she’d acquired in the hospital and she was too weak to stand on her own. Didion and Gerry Michael took her to Didion’s apartment. At one point, Quintana got out of bed to fetch an extra quilt and fell to the floor. Didion could not lift her and called for help from a member of the building’s staff.

  Three days later, Gerry rushed her to the Columbia-Presbyterian emergency room because she was suffering from chest pains and a rising fever.

  Here is another clear instance of what happened to her: The doctors at Beth Israel North could have predicted that after her extended immobility she had a high chance of developing pulmonary emboli, but they failed to prepare adequately for this possibility before releasing her.

  Columbia-Presbyterian gave “Q a very new-on-the-scene blood thinner” to prevent further clotting while the existing clots dissolved, Sean Michael recalls. “It was meant to create more unrestricted circulatory functions and increase the blood’s abilities to fight toxins and win the battle against her system’s weakened immune system. It was a super-blood.”

  On February 3, she went home again. Along with her mother, Nick, and Tony, she began to plan her father’s memorial service, which was to be held at Saint John the Divine. Didion told her she was thinking of reading W. H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues,” because the poem so perfectly captured the anger and helplessness she’d felt: “For nothing now can ever come to any good.”

  Quintana begged her not to read the poem. Everything about it was “wrong,” she said. Didion acquiesced to her daughter’s “vehement” request.

  The memorial was scheduled for March 23 at four o’clock in the afternoon (Liz Smith announced in her newspaper gossip column that it would be the “place to be” in New York that day). In the weeks prior,
Didion became a fierce and no-nonsense organizer. She arranged to have the marble plate on which her mother’s name was inscribed recut to include her husband’s. His ashes would rest next to Eduene’s. She checked with friends who planned to speak, discussed what they were going to say, and offered suggestions. Susanna Moore was staying at the American Academy in Rome, but she adjusted her schedule to attend the service. Initially, Didion asked Moore to read a passage from Henry V that Dunne had always loved—all about reaching home safely. Finally, she decided the last section of Eliot’s “East Coker” would be best, the part about mastering language when one no longer has anything to say.

  Between e-mail discussions of poetry and grief, the women shared the horrors of osteoporosis, of Fosomax and exercise, the disgusting spectacle of aging. Later, in interviews, Didion would insist she never saw herself as old: “When John was alive, I saw myself through his eyes, and he saw me as how old I was when we got married.” Marriage, she would say, was a journey through time but it was also a denial of time.

  She told Moore it was heartening to hear how much she’d fallen in love with the beauties of Rome (in contrast to dirty New York); Moore’s Roman rhapsodies had helped Didion see the world’s possibilities again.

  Dunne’s memorial was an afternoon of “literature, liturgy, and laughter,” said a New York Times reporter. “He understood the disastrous cardiovascular hand he’d been dealt, so he wasted nothing,” David Halberstam remarked in his eulogy. He talked about Dunne’s final, unfinished project, a book on contemporary patriotism and the “ever-widening gap” between people in the Bush administration—like his old Princeton classmate Donald H. Rumsfeld—who’d managed to avoid military service but who were now making war decisions, and the young men and women on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  Moore read the “East Coker” passage and Nick read Catullus’s “On His Brother’s Death.” Calvin Trillin recalled Dunne’s love of gossip. There were readings from Ogden Nash and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Quintana’s old friend Susan Traylor shared memories of attending a prostitute’s trial in Hawaii with Dunne—his idea of taking the girls on vacation—and of going to a party at Mick Jagger’s with him (he thought it was okay for the girls to miss school the next day). Daniel Morrissey, a Roman Catholic priest, read from the Gospel of Luke and from Saint Thomas Aquinas. He spoke of the God Dunne “wrestled with.” Quintana had asked that the Gregorian chant be in Latin.

  Weak but firmly composed, she read a poem she had written for her dad. Just eight months earlier, she had worn white in this cathedral for her wedding. Now she was clad in lusterless black.

  “For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past,” the crowd recited. “In paradisum deducant angeli.”

  Wearing her sunglasses, Didion read a passage from Harp, a wry discussion of failing health. She said Dunne saw plainly what was coming while she had steered clear of it. “I thought I got it,” she said. “But I was afraid to look at it. He had a straighter view of his own mortality than I could afford to have.”

  Later, in her “magical” delirium, she couldn’t comprehend, emotionally, how she could have gone through the ritual of memorializing her husband and saying good-bye, and still he didn’t return to her.

  2

  Quintana had arranged to take Gerry to California a day and a half after the memorial service to walk the beaches of her beloved Malibu and show him where she had grown up. “I had encouraged this,” Didion wrote. “I wanted to see Malibu color on her face and hair again.” Quintana was eager but anxious—packing for a trip always made her nervous, as though she’d lost control of all her things. She asked her mother if she’d be all right in California. Of course she’d be okay, Didion told her. It was a new beginning. She’d see the orchids at Zuma Canyon. She’d see the lifeguards’ cozy hut. The hills would be full of wild mustard.

  For Didion, too, perhaps the season had turned. The ice floes had melted in the rivers.

  Just after seven o’clock on the evening of March 25, Didion’s phone rang. It was her nephew Tony, saying he’d be right over. According to The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion knew his wife, Rosemary, had been weakened recently by a new experimental treatment for her blood disorder. She wondered if something had happened.

  It wasn’t Rosemary, Tony told her. It was Quintana.

  At that very moment, doctors were performing emergency neurosurgery on her at the UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles.

  After landing at LAX and retrieving her bag, Quintana had fallen and hit her head on her way out of the arrivals terminal. “[My dad] said she was fine walking one minute. And then fell the next,” Sean Michael said. “It was a fall anyone could have and barely remember a month later. But the blood rushed to the site of the impact in her head.”

  Later, Internet gossipmongers spread reckless stories that Quintana had been drinking on the plane and that this was the cause of her fall. These rumors received some support from friends of Quintana’s who spoke to a reporter I interviewed (he preferred to remain off the record), and from “reliable” folks who related the story to Claire Potter, a professor of history at the New School. These folks would not go public.

  Sean Michael doesn’t buy the stories. “Do I know if she was drinking on the airplane? No. No idea. Was not told that by my dad.” Even in her compromised state, given her past experience with alcohol, “she would have had to have had about twelve double Scotches to fall down.” She never got “stupid drunk.” Sean says the simple fact is that she was “light-headed from the blood thinner, her weakened immune system, and the flight itself.” And because of the experimental medication, her natural coagulants had “turned off.” When her head hit the ground, the blood “kept coming like a garden hose attached to your ear, creating almost instant brain damage.”

  Forty-two minutes later, doctors drilled into her head “to give the blood an escape route,” Sean said. “At this point, she was considered lucky, as she had only been paralyzed on one side of her body. Her face was a heavy mask on one side—and lit with life on the other.”

  * * *

  The following day, Didion flew from Teterboro to Los Angeles on Harrison Ford’s private plane, along with her friend Earl McGrath. Ford “happened to be in New York and heard about Q’s condition … and called to offer to take Joan,” said Sean Michael. “I find that to be a beautiful thing,” he said. “A man you hire to build cabinets, thirty years later is flying you in his private jet to your daughter’s hospital bedside.”

  “You’re safe,” Didion whispered to Quintana in the intensive care unit at UCLA. “I’m here. You’re going to be all right.”

  Part of Quintana’s hair had been shaved and her skull had been stapled. Once again, she could breathe only with the aid of a tube. Doctors were not sure to what extent she might have suffered brain damage.

  On the day the tube was removed, Quintana asked her mother, “When do you have to leave?” Didion said she would not leave until they left together.

  For the next five weeks, Didion spent nights at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, reading medical texts, from which she would quote to Quintana’s doctors, to keep them on track. Patiently, they tolerated her intrusions. Because she had left New York so quickly and had brought only heavy winter clothes, she bought several pairs of blue cotton medical scrubs to wear to the hospital. Only later did she realize that the doctors might view this as a “suspicious violation of boundaries.”

  On April 1, Quintana’s physicians inserted a tracheotomy tube to lessen the risk of windpipe damage and pneumonia once the breathing tube was removed. She was transferred from the ICU to an observation room. From the windows at UCLA, Didion said, she could look down into a swimming pool. It was always empty. One day, she remembered the night she had clogged the filter intake of the Brentwood pool with gardenias and floating candles in her misguided attempt to fancy up a party. This memory led her to an image of Dunne wading in the pool, reading Sophie’s Choice. The trick was to avoid s
pinning back and back and back in one’s mind … a cascade of memories that Didion termed the “vortex effect.” It was hard to stop during those weeks in L.A., driving from hotel to hospital. She wouldn’t go near Brentwood. She mapped alternate routes so she wouldn’t have to pass through the intersection at Sunset and Beverly Glen, where she used to drive Quintana to the Westlake School for Girls. She did not tune the car radio to her old standby, KRLA, or to the Christian talk station that used to amuse her.

  In the evenings, old friends distracted her at dinner: Connie Wald, Susan Traylor and Jesse Dylan, Earl McGrath. They’d go to Orso or Morton’s (an old favorite of Dunne’s—the vortex whirled very near on those nights). Before going to bed, she’d phone room service and order the following morning’s breakfast, always huevos rancheros, one scrambled egg. She kept a tight lid on her routines. Strict lines. A safe little box.

  But then the jacaranda would bloom. The Santa Ana would blow. She found herself in tears.

  What if she had refused to move to New York in 1988? Would Quintana have come back to California after graduating from Barnard? Could the narrative have been different? No pneumonia—just that healthy Malibu sunshine.

  Was Didion responsible for all that had happened?

  I’m here. Maybe that was the problem, she thought.

  I’m ready to die, but you and Jim need me. Her mother had said this on her deathbed to her children, who had lived to be in their sixties.

  You’re safe. I’m here. How thoroughly we delude ourselves.

  * * *

  On April 30, 2004, the UCLA doctors determined that Quintana was strong enough to fly cross-country on a Cessna with two paramedics and her mother to be admitted into the Rusk Institute at New York University Hospital for neuro rehab. Didion described the trip in The Year of Magical Thinking: They left on a morning when medical helicopters circled the roof at UCLA, “suggesting trauma all over Southern California,” remote scenes “of highway carnage, distant falling cranes, bad days ahead for the husband or wife or mother or father who had not yet … gotten the call.” A globalizing impulse, a therapist might have told her of this morose passage: every depressive’s fallback position. It had always been a key component of Didion’s literary sensibility.