The Year of Magical Thinking

by Joan Didion

  To delay the transfer into the following week could only dispirit and confuse Quintana, I said, sure of my ground.

  Rusk had no problem with a Friday night admission, I said, less sure.

  There was nowhere I could stay over the weekend, I lied.

  By the time the discharge coordinator had agreed to the Friday transfer Quintana was asleep. I sat for a while in the sun on the plaza outside the hospital and watched a helicopter circling to land on the roof. Helicopters were always landing on 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 (even as the helicopter landed and the trauma team rushed the stretcher into triage) gotten the call. I remembered a summer day in 1970 when John and I stopped for a red light on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans and noticed the driver of the next car suddenly slump over his steering wheel. His horn sounded. Several pedestrians ran up. A police officer materialized. The light changed, we drove on. John had been unable to get this image out of his mind. There he was, he had kept saying later. He was alive and then he was dead and we were watching. We saw him at the instant it happened. We knew he was dead before his family did.

  Just an ordinary day.

  “And then—gone.”

  The day of the flight, when it came, had seemed to unfold with the nonsequential inexorability of a dream. When I turned on the news in the early morning there was a guerrilla action on the freeways, truckers protesting the price of gasoline. Huge semi trucks had been deliberately jackknifed and abandoned on Interstate 5. Witnesses reported that the first semis to stop had carried the TV crews. SUVs had been waiting to take the truckers themselves from the blocked freeway. The video as I watched it had seemed dislocatingly French, 1968. “Avoid the 5 if you can,” the newscaster advised, then warned that according to “sources” (presumably the same TV crews who were traveling with the truckers) the truckers would also block other freeways, specifically the 710, the 60, and the 10. In the normal course of this kind of disruption it would have seemed unlikely that we could get from UCLA to the plane, but by the time the ambulance arrived at the hospital the entire French event seemed to have dematerialized, that phase of the dream forgotten.

  There were other phases to come. I had been told the plane would be at Santa Monica Airport. The ambulance crew had been told Burbank. Someone made a call and was told Van Nuys. When we reached Van Nuys there were no planes in sight, only helicopters. That must be because you’re going by helicopter, one of the ambulance attendants said, clearly ready to hand us off and get on with his day. I don’t think so, I said, it’s three thousand miles. The ambulance attendant shrugged and disappeared. The plane was located, a jet Cessna with room for the two pilots, the two paramedics, the stretcher to which Quintana was strapped, and, if I sat on a bench over the oxygen canisters, me. We took off. We flew for a while. One of the paramedics had a digital camera and was taking pictures of what he kept referring to as the Grand Canyon. I said I believed it was Lake Mead, Hoover Dam. I pointed out Las Vegas.

  The paramedic continued taking pictures.

  He also continued referring to it as the Grand Canyon.

  Why do you always have to be right, I remembered John saying.

  It was a complaint, a charge, part of a fight.

  He never understood that in my own mind I was never right. Once in 1971, when we were moving from Franklin Avenue to Malibu, I found a message stuck behind a picture I was taking down. The message was from someone to whom I had been close before I married John. He had spent a few weeks with us in the house on Franklin Avenue. This was the message: “You were wrong.” I did not know what I had been wrong about but the possibilities seemed infinite. I burned the message. I never mentioned it to John.

  All right it’s the Grand Canyon, I thought, shifting position on the bench over the oxygen canisters so that I could no longer see out the window.

  Later we landed in a cornfield in Kansas to refuel. The pilots struck a deal with the two teenagers who managed the airstrip: during the refueling they would take their pickup to a McDonald’s and bring back hamburgers. While we waited the paramedics suggested that we take turns getting some exercise. When my turn came I stood frozen on the tarmac for a moment, ashamed to be free and outside when Quintana could not be, then walked to where the runway ended and the corn started. There was a little rain and unstable air and I imagined a tornado coming. Quintana and I were Dorothy. We were both free. In fact we were out of here. John had written a tornado into Nothing Lost. I remembered reading the last-pass galleys in Quintana’s room at Presbyterian and crying when I hit the passage with the tornado. The protagonists, J.J. McClure and Teresa Kean, see the tornado “in the far distance, black and then milky when the sun caught it, moving like a huge reticulated vertical snake.” J.J. tells Teresa not to worry, this stretch had been hit before, twisters never hit the same place twice.

  The tornado finally set down without incident just across the Wyoming line. That night in the Step Right Inn, at the junction between Higginson and Higgins, Teresa asked if it was true that tornadoes never hit the same place twice. “I don’t know,” J.J. said. “It seemed logical. Like lightning. You were worried. I didn’t want you worried.” It was as close a declaration of love as J.J. was capable of making.

  Back in the plane, alone with Quintana, I took one of the hamburgers the teenagers had brought and tore it into pieces so that she and I could share. After a few bites she shook her head. She had been allowed solid food for only a week or so and could not eat more. There was still a feeding tube in place in case she could not eat at all.

  “Am I going to make it,” she asked then.

  I chose to believe that she was asking if she would make it to New York.

  “Definitely,” I told her.

  I’m here. You’re safe.

  Definitely she would be okay in California, I remembered telling her five weeks before.

  That night when we arrived at the Rusk Institute Gerry and Tony were waiting outside to meet the ambulance. Gerry asked how the flight had been. I said that we had shared a Big Mac in a cornfield in Kansas. “It wasn’t a Big Mac,” Quintana said. “It was a Quarter Pounder.”

  It had seemed to me on the day in Quintana’s room at Presbyterian when I read the final proof for Nothing Lost that there might be a grammatical error in the last sentence of the passage about J.J. McClure and Teresa Kean and the tornado. I never actually learned the rules of grammar, relying instead only on what sounded right, but there was something here that I was not sure sounded right. The sentence in the last-pass galleys read: “It was as close a declaration of love as J.J. was capable of making.” I would have added a preposition: “It was as close to a declaration of love as J.J. was capable of making.”

  I sat by the window and watched the ice floes on the Hudson and thought about the sentence. It was as close a declaration of love as J.J. was capable of making. It was not the kind of sentence, if you had written it, you would want wrong, but neither was it the kind of sentence, if that was the way you had written it, you would want changed. How had he written it? What did he have in mind? How would he want it? The decision was left to me. Any choice I made could carry the potential for abandonment, even betrayal. That was one reason I was crying in Quintana’s hospital room. When I got home that night I checked the previous galleys and manuscripts. The error, if it was an error, had been there from the beginning. I left it as it was.

  Why do you always have to be right.

  Why do you always have to have the last word.

  For once in your life just let it go.

  12.

  The day on which Quintana and I flew east on the Cessna that refueled in the cornfield in Kansas was April 30, 2004. During May and June and the half of July that she spent at the Rusk Institute there was very little I could do for her. I could go down to East Thirty-fourth Street to see her in the late afternoons, an
d most afternoons I did, but she was in therapy from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon and exhausted by six-thirty or seven. She was medically stable. She could eat, the feeding tube was still in place but no longer necessary. She was beginning to regain movement in her right leg and arm. She was regaining the mobility in her right eye that she needed to read. On weekend days when she did not have therapy Gerry would take her to lunch and a movie in the neighborhood. He would eat dinner with her. Friends would join them for picnic lunches. For as long as she was at Rusk I could water the plants on her windowsill, I could find the marginally different sneakers her therapist had decreed, I could sit with her in the greenhouse off the Rusk lobby watching the koi in the pond, but once she left Rusk I would no longer be able to do even that. She was reaching a point at which she would need once again to be, if she was to recover, on her own.

  I determined to spend the summer reaching the same point.

  I did not yet have the concentration to work but I could straighten my house, I could get on top of things, I could deal with my unopened mail.

  That I was only now beginning the process of mourning did not occur to me.

  Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention. Until now there had been every urgent reason to obliterate any attention that might otherwise have been paid, banish the thought, bring fresh adrenaline to bear on the crisis of the day. I had passed an entire season during which the only words I allowed myself to truly hear were recorded: Wel-come to U-C-L-A.

  I began.

  Among the letters and books and magazines that had arrived while I was in Los Angeles was a thick volume called Lives of ’54, prepared for what was by then the imminent fiftieth reunion of John’s class at Princeton. I looked up John’s entry. It read: “William Faulkner once said that a writer’s obituary should read, ‘He wrote books, then he died.’ This is not an obit (at least as of 19 September 2002) and I am still writing books. So I’ll stick with Faulkner.”

  I told myself: this was not an obit.

  At least as of 19 September 2002.

  I closed Lives of ’54. A few weeks later I opened it again, and leafed through the other entries. One was from Donald H. (“Rummy”) Rumsfeld, who noted: “After Princeton, the years seem like a blur, but the days seem more like rapid fire.” I thought about this. Another, a three-page reflection by Lancelot L. (“Lon”) Farrar, Jr., began: “Arguably our best-shared Princeton memory was Adlai Stevenson’s address to the senior banquet.”

  I also thought about this.

  I had been married to a member of the Class of ’54 for forty years and he had never mentioned Adlai Stevenson’s address to the senior banquet. I tried to think of anything at all he had mentioned about Princeton. He had many times mentioned the misguided entitlement he heard in the words “Princeton in the Nation’s Service,” the slogan Princeton had adopted from a speech by Woodrow Wilson. Other than that I could think of nothing except his saying a few days after our wedding (why did he say it? how had it come up?) that he had thought the Nassoons absurd. In fact, because he knew it amused me, he would sometimes impersonate the Nassoons in performance: the studied plunge of one hand into a pocket, the swirling of the ice cubes in the imaginary glass, the chin thrust into profile, the slight satisfied smile.

  As I remember you—

  We stood there together on a high windy slope—Our faces to the weather and our hearts full of hope—

  For forty years this song had figured in a private joke between us and I could not remember its name, let alone the rest of its lyrics. Finding the lyrics became a matter of some urgency. I could find only a single reference on the Internet, in an obituary from the Princeton Alumni Weekly:

  John MacFadyen ’46 *49: John MacFadyen died February 18, 2000, in Damariscotta, Maine, near the village of Head Tide, where he and his wife, Mary-Esther, made their home. The cause of death was pneumonia, but his health failed for some years, particularly after his wife’s death in 1977. John came to Princeton from Duluth in the ‘accelerated’ summer of 1942. Gifted in music and arts, he contributed songs to Triangle, including, “As I Remember You,” long a Nassoons favorite. John was the life of any party with a piano. Remembered was his rendition of “Shine, Little Glow Worm,” played upside down from under the piano. After U.S. Army service in Japan, he returned to Princeton for a master’s of fine arts in architecture. In the New York firm Harrison & Abramowitz, he designed a main United Nations building. John received the Rome Prize in architecture, and, newly wed to Mary-Esther Edge, spent 1952–53 at Rome’s American Academy. His private architectural practice, noted especially for the design of the Wolf Trap Center for the Arts outside Washington, was interrupted by his service, during the 1960s, under Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, as executive director of the first state arts council. The class joins his children, Camilla, Luke, William, and John and three grandchildren in mourning the loss of one of our most unforgettable members.

  “As I Remember You,” long a Nassoons favorite.

  But how about the death of Mary-Esther?

  And how long ago was it when the life of any party last played “Shine, Little Glow Worm” upside down from under the piano?

  What would I give to be able to discuss this with John?

  What would I give to be able to discuss anything at all with John? What would I give to be able to say one small thing that made him happy? What would that one small thing be? If I had said it in time would it have worked?

  A night or two before he died John asked me if I was aware how many characters died in the novel he had just sent to press, Nothing Lost. He had been sitting in his office making a list of them. I added one he had overlooked. Some months after he died I picked up a legal pad on his desk to make a note. On the legal pad, in very faint pencil, his handwriting, was the list. It read:

  Teresa Kean

  Parlance

  Emmett McClure

  Jack Broderick

  Maurice Dodd

  Four people in car

  Charlie Buckles

  Percy—electric chair (Percy Darrow)

  Walden McClure

  Why was the pencil so faint, I wondered.

  Why would he use a pencil that barely left a mark.

  When did he begin seeing himself as dead?

  “It’s not black and white,” a young doctor at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles had told me, in 1982, about the divide between life and death. We had been standing in an ICU at Cedars watching Nick and Lenny’s daughter Dominique, who had the night before been strangled to the point of death. Dominique was lying there in the ICU as if she were asleep but she would not recover. She was breathing only on life support.

  Dominique had been the four-year-old at John’s and my wedding.

  Dominique had been the cousin who supervised Quintana’s parties and took her shopping for prom dresses and stayed with her if we were out of town. Roses are red, violets are blue, read the card on a glass of flowers Quintana and Dominique left on the kitchen table for our return from one such trip. I wish you weren’t home and Dominique does too. Love, Happy Mother’s Day, D & Q.

  I remember thinking that the doctor was wrong. For as long as Dominique lay in this ICU she was alive. She could not keep herself alive unaided but she was alive. That was white. When they turned off the life support there would be a matter of some minutes before her systems shut down and then she would be dead. That was black.

  There were no faint traces about dead, no pencil marks.

  Any faint traces, any pencil marks, were left “a night or two before he died,” or “a week or two before,” in any case decisively before he died.

  There was a divide.

  The abrupt finality of this divide was something about which I thought a great deal during the late spring and summer after I came home from UCLA. A close friend, Carolyn Lelyveld, died in May, at Memorial Sloan-Kettering. Tony Dunne’s wife,
Rosemary Breslin, died in June, at Columbia-Presbyterian. In each of those cases the phrase “after long illness” would have seemed to apply, trailing its misleading suggestion of release, relief, resolution. In each of those long illnesses the possibility of death had been in the picture, in Carolyn’s case for some months, in Rosemary’s since 1989, when she was thirty-two. Yet having seen the picture in no way deflected, when it came, the swift empty loss of the actual event. It was still black and white. Each of them had been in the last instant alive, and then dead. I realized that I had never believed in the words I had learned as a child in order to be confirmed as an Episcopalian: I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting, amen.

  I did not believe in the resurrection of the body.

  Nor had Teresa Kean, Parlance, Emmett McClure, Jack Broderick, Maurice Dodd, the four people in the car, Charlie Buckles, Percy Darrow, or Walden McClure.

  Nor had my Catholic husband.

  I imagined this way of thinking to be clarifying, but in point of fact it was so muddled as to contradict even itself.

  I did not believe in the resurrection of the body but I still believed that given the right circumstances he would come back.

  He who left the faint traces before he died, the Number Three pencil.

  One day it seemed important that I reread Alcestis. I had last read it at sixteen or seventeen, for a paper on Euripides, but recalled it as somehow relevant to this question of the “divide.” I remembered the Greeks in general but Alcestis in particular as good on the passage between life and death. They visualized it, they dramatized it, they made the dark water and the ferry into the mise-en-scène itself. I did reread Alcestis. What happens in the play is this: Admetus, the young king of Thessaly, has been condemned by Death to die. Apollo has interceded, gaining a promise from the Fates that Admetus, if he can find another mortal to die in his place, need not die immediately. Admetus approaches his friends and his parents, in vain. “I tell myself that we are a long time underground and that life is short, but sweet,” his father tells him after declining to take his place.