The cover story in tomorrow’s New York Times Magazine is adapted from Joan Didion’s forthcoming book, The Year of Magical Thinking. It is about the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and Didion’s subsequent actions and reactions. Dunne died of a heart attack before his wife’s eyes on December 30, 2003, sitting at the dinner table in their New York home. Her description of the event — the arrival of the parameds, the trip to the hospital — seems oddly familiar, not because we have heard or witnessed this story before (some of us have) but because the trademark Didion style makes it seem familiar. She witnesses her witnessing with a sense of detachment, as usual in her reporting. As the social worker at the hospital remarks when she beats the doctor to the punch in announcing Dunne’s death, “She’s a pretty cool customer.”
What is more surprising, to reader and writer alike, is the depth of the grief that follows. She explores her grief as if it were a cave, using her intellect and her skills as a writer to illuminate the murk. They were married for almost 40 years and it is his absence as much as his presence that she devotes her narrative to.
Did I mention that their daughter was in a coma at the time of Dunne’s death?
Just last week I was reading to my students from her essay “The White Album” (1979) in which she described an ambivalent diagnosis of MS she received from a doctor — “an exclusionary diagnosis [that] meant nothing. I had at this time a sharp apprehension not of what it was like to be old but of what it was like to open the door to the stranger and find that the stranger did indeed have the knife. In a few lines of dialogue in a neurologist’s office in Beverly Hills, the improbable had become probable, the norm. Things which happened only to other people could in fact happen to me. I could be struck by lightning, could dare to eat a peach and be poisoned by the cyanide in the stone. The startling fact was this: my body was offering a precise physiological equivalent to what had been going on in my mind. ‘Lead a simple life,’ the neurologist advised. ‘Not that it makes any difference we know about.’ In other words it was another story without a narrative.”
Different story, different stranger, same knife.