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zenithblue) wrote2006-06-08 02:56 pm
Didion's recent book
The Year of Magical Thinking is all about grief, the year of insanity after her husband died and during which her daughter was frighteningly ill. First off I'll say the art of this book, as is always the case when Didion is writing, is incredible. She is a wicked smart woman, with unbelievable presence on the page. Her prose is deceptively clear, but underneath there are very complex things at work.
This book in particular, though, brought me back to the time right after my grandma died.
You have to understand, my family had been dropping like flies. A twelve year old cousin was hit by a car, and then the following year my grandpa lost a 15 year battle with cancer. These deaths were hard, and I certainly grieved. But when my grandma died in a car accident, everything on the planet turned to shit. It wasn't just a "grandma-death." When I talk about my grandma I get sympathetic but non-comprehending nods. Everyone has lost a grandparent or two, and it’s a sad fact of life for most of them, not an earth-shattering drama. She was one of the tiny handful of people I loved most in the world. When grandpa died, I mourned my grandpa. When grandma died, I mourned one of my best friends.
The year and a half afterwards was marked by hallucinations, anxiety attacks, agoraphobia, social malfunction, and delusions, the extent of which not a whole lot of people know. I lost roughly half my friends at that point in time, in part because of my own bad behavior (becoming socially phobic, I either ignored a lot of them or acted so weird no one wanted anything to do with me). I was terrified every time I got in my car. I had a constant delusion that I had already died and I was a ghost, intense enough that there were moments I believed it. I had this very pervasive belief that if I could figure out a way to travel in time I could head back to that one stupid idiotic moment when her vehicle did not stop, and I could fix it. Once again, there were moments I literally believed this possible. I started believing in god again just so I could hate him. The worst delusion was the literal and profound belief that things would never be “good” again. All innocence, fun, beauty, comfort, calm, solace, love, compassion, everything, was removed from the planet for good, and all I had to look forward to was disappointment and sickness. For a year and a half that was the truth I held immutable.
I promise I have a point in all this inarticulate blather, and that is this: grief is one of the most isolating experiences I have ever been through. And to read Joan Didion's highly literate, intelligent, and unflinching analysis of grief and its attendant delusions and neuroses, it seems that we are not alone in this isolation (ha ha ha). Her book is the first time I have ever heard someone talk openly about these weird altered states of mind. She mentions waiting for her husband to come back, all through that first year operating under the strained assumption that eventually he would come back. In one passage, she mentions the way grief has changed in a hundred years, how death used to be such a regular occurrence there was a definite etiquette around it, there was the expectation that a person would grieve, there was the opportunity to wear black, there was the knowledge that the person would need room for their grief. Now that we’ve decided we can fight death, no one wants it obvious anymore. No one wants to see it on your sleeve, and it’s become a creepy, weird, foreign thing for a person to be in mourning for a year or more, even though that’s the minimum time frame psychologists give for recovering from a loss. This struck a chord with me; one of the few things I remember clearly from this time period was the confused and pitying looks I’d get from people who either could not or did not want to comprehend.
It was incredibly cathartic for me to read this book, even though it’s been (wow) five years since Grandma died, and I have in fact recovered enough to breathe normally, to speak generally understandable English to my friends, to leave the house once in a while. I no longer believe that the end of all good things has come. Grief like that, though, leaves its mark for good. I walk and laugh and breathe and hope, but there is just always a little grey smudge on the world now, bearable, but indelible.
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Our cultures attitudes about things that should not be spoken of in polite company (such as depression, isolation, and the horrid realities of war) can make grieving even harder, of course. I shudder to think of what it must be like to be the parent or relative of someone who's been maimed or killed in one of our current conflicts, much less someone who's seen their friends and comrades killed in front of them.
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Made me want to kick something and not stop kicking.