by Joan Didion
I also notice that I do not have the resilience I had a year ago. A certain number of crises occur and the mechanism that floods the situation with adrenaline burns out. Mobilization becomes unreliable, slow or absent. In August and September, after the Democratic and Republican conventions but before the election, I wrote, for the first time since John died, a piece. It was about the campaign. It was the first piece I had written since 1963 that he did not read in draft form and tell me what was wrong, what was needed, how to bring it up here, take it down there. I have never written pieces fluently but this one seemed to be taking even longer than usual: I realized at some point that I was unwilling to finish it, because there was no one to read it. I kept telling myself that I had a deadline, that John and I never missed deadlines. Whatever I finally did to finish this piece was as close as I have ever come to imagining a message from him. The message was simple: You’re a professional. Finish the piece.
It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
The trach at UCLA, I recognize now, was going to happen with or without me.
Quintana resuming her life, I recognize now, was going to happen with or without me.
Finishing this piece, which was to say resuming my own life, was not.
When I checked the piece for publication I was startled and unsettled by how many mistakes I had made: simple errors of transcription, names and dates wrong. I told myself that this was temporary, part of the mobilization problem, further evidence of those cognitive deficits that came with either stress or grief, but I remained unsettled. Would I ever be right again? Could I ever again trust myself not to be wrong?
Do you always have to be right? He had said that.
Is it impossible for you to consider the possibility that you might be wrong?
Increasingly I find myself focusing on the similarities between these December days and the same December days a year ago. In certain ways those similar days a year ago have more clarity for me, a sharper focus. I do many of the same things. I make the same lists of things undone. I wrap Christmas presents in the same colored tissue, write the same messages on the same postcards from the Whitney gift shop, affix the postcards to the colored tissue with the same gold notary seals. I write the same checks for the building staff, except the checks are now imprinted with only my name. I would not have changed the checks (any more than I would change the voice on the answering machine) but it was said to be essential that John’s name now appear only on trust accounts. I order the same kind of ham from Citarella. I fret the same way over the number of plates I will need on Christmas Eve, count and recount. I keep an annual December dentist’s appointment and realize as I am putting the sample toothbrushes into my bag that no one will be waiting for me in the reception room, reading the papers until we can go to breakfast at 3 Guys on Madison Avenue. The morning goes empty. When I pass 3 Guys I look the other way. A friend asks me to go with her to hear the Christmas music at St. Ignatius Loyola, and we walk home in the dark in the rain. That night the first snow falls, although only a dusting, no avalanching off the roof of St. James’, nothing like my birthday a year ago.
My birthday a year ago when he gave me the last present he would ever give me.
My birthday a year ago when he had twenty-five nights left to live.
On the table in front of the fireplace I notice something out of place in the stack of books nearest the chair in which John sat to read when he woke in the middle of the night. I have deliberately left this stack untouched, not from any shrine-building impulse but because I did not believe that I could afford to think about what he read in the middle of the night. Now someone has placed on top of the stack, balanced precariously, a large illustrated coffee-table book, The Agnelli Gardens at Villar Perosa. I move The Agnelli Gardens at Villar Perosa. Beneath it is a heavily marked copy of John Lukacs’s Five Days in London: May 1940, in which there is a laminated bookmark that reads, in a child’s handwriting, John—happy reading to you—from John, age 7. I am at first puzzled by the bookmark, which under the lamination is dusted with festive pink glitter, then remember: the Creative Artists Agency, as a Christmas project every year, “adopts” a group of Los Angeles schoolchildren, each of whom in turn makes a keepsake for a designated CAA client.
He would have opened the box from CAA on Christmas night.
He would have stuck the bookmark in whatever book was on top of that stack.
He would have had one hundred and twenty hours left to live.
How would he have chosen to live those one hundred and twenty hours?
Beneath the copy of Five Days in London is a copy of The New Yorker dated January 5, 2004. A copy of The New Yorker with that issue date would have been delivered to our apartment on Sunday, December 28, 2003. On Sunday, December 28, 2003, according to John’s calendar, we had dinner at home with Sharon DeLano, who had been his editor at Random House and was at that time his editor at The New Yorker. We would have had dinner at the table in the living room. According to my kitchen notebook we ate linguine Bolognese and a salad and cheese and a baguette. At that point he would have had forty-eight hours left to live.
Some premonition of this timetable was why I had not touched the stack of books in the first place.
I don’t think I’m up for this, he had said in the taxi on our way down from Beth Israel North that night or the next night. He was talking about the condition in which we had once again left Quintana.
You don’t get a choice, I had said in the taxi.
I have wondered since if he did.
21.
She’s still beautiful,” Gerry had said as he and John and I left Quintana in the ICU at Beth Israel North.
“He said she’s still beautiful,” John said in the taxi. “Did you hear him say that? She’s still beautiful? She’s lying there swollen up with tubes coming out of her and he said—”
He could not continue.
That happened on one of those late December nights a few days before he died. Whether it happened on the 26th or the 27th or the 28th or the 29th I have no idea. It did not happen on the 30th because Gerry had already left the hospital by the time we got there on the 30th. I realize that much of my energy during the past months has been given to counting back the days, the hours. At the moment he was saying in the taxi on the way down from Beth Israel North that everything he had done was worthless did he have three hours left to live or did he have twenty-seven? Did he know how few hours there were, did he feel himself going, was he saying that he did not want to leave? Don’t let the Broken Man catch me, Quintana would say when she woke from bad dreams, one of the “sayings” John put in the box and borrowed for Cat in Dutch Shea, Jr. I had promised her that we would not let the Broken Man catch her.
You’re safe.
I’m here.
I had believed that we had that power.
Now the Broken Man was in the ICU at Beth Israel North waiting for her and now the Broken Man was in this taxi waiting for her father. Even at three or four she had recognized that when it came to the Broken Man she could rely only on her own efforts: If the Broken Man comes I’ll hang onto the fence and won’t let him take me.
She hung onto the fence. Her father did not.
I tell you I shall not live two days.
What gives those December days a year ago their sharper focus is their ending.
22.
As the grandchild of a geologist I learned early to anticipate the absolute mutability of hills and waterfalls and even islands. When a hill slumps into the ocean I see the order in it. When a 5.2 on the Richter Scale wrenches the writing table in my own room in my own house in my own particular Welbeck Street I keep on typing. A hill is a transitional accommodation to stress, and ego may be a similar accommodation. A waterfall is a self-correcting maladjustment of stream to structure, and so, for all I know, is technique. The very island to which Inez Victor returned in the spring of 1975—Oahu, an emergent post-erosional
land mass along the Hawaiian Ridge—is a temporary feature, and every rainfall or tremor along the Pacific plates alters its shape and shortens its tenure as Crossroads of the Pacific. In this light it is difficult to maintain definite convictions about what happened down there in the spring of 1975, or before.
This passage is from the beginning of a novel I wrote during the early 1980s, Democracy. John named it. I had begun it as a comedy of family manners with the title Angel Visits, a phrase defined by Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable as “delightful intercourse of short duration and rare occurrence,” but when it became clear that it was going in a different direction I had kept writing without a title. When I finished John read it and said I should call it Democracy. I looked up the passage after the 9.0 Richter earthquake along a six-hundred-mile section of the Sumatran subduction zone had triggered the tsunami that wiped out large parts of coastline bordering the Indian Ocean.
I am unable to stop trying to imagine this event.
There is no video of what I try to imagine. There are no beaches, no flooded swimming pools, no hotel lobbies breaking up like rotted pilings in a storm. What I want to see happened under the surface. The India Plate buckling as it thrust under the Burma Plate. The current sweeping unseen through the deep water. I do not have a depth chart for the Indian Ocean but can pick up the broad outline even from my Rand McNally cardboard globe. Seven hundred and eighty meters off Banda Aceh. Twenty-three hundred between Sumatra and Sri Lanka. Twenty-one hundred between the Andamans and Thailand and then a long shallowing toward Phuket. The instant when the leading edge of the unseen current got slowed by the continental shelf. The buildup of water as the bottom of the shelf began to shallow out.
As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end.
It is now December 31, 2004, a year and a day.
On December 24, Christmas Eve, I had people for dinner, just as John and I had done on Christmas Eve a year before. I told myself that I was doing this for Quintana but I was also doing it for myself, a pledge that I would not lead the rest of my life as a special case, a guest, someone who could not function on her own. I built a fire, I lit candles, I laid out plates and silver on a buffet table in the dining room. I put out some CDs, Mabel Mercer singing Cole Porter and Israel Kamakawiwo‘ole singing “Over the Rainbow” and an Israeli jazz pianist named Liz Magnes playing “Someone to Watch Over Me.” John had been seated next to Liz Magnes once at a dinner at the Israeli mission and she had sent him the CD, a Gershwin concert she had given in Marrakech. In its ability to suggest drinks at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem during the British period this CD had seemed to John spectrally interesting, recovered evidence of a vanished world, one more reverberation from World War One. He referred to it as “the Mandate music.” He had put it on while he was reading before dinner the night he died.
About five in the afternoon on the 24th I thought I could not do the evening but when the time came the evening did itself.
Susanna Moore sent leis from Honolulu for her daughter Lulu and Quintana and me. We wore the leis. Another friend brought a gingerbread house. There were many children. I played the Mandate music, although the noise level was such that no one heard it.
On Christmas morning I put away the plates and silver and in the afternoon I went up to St. John the Divine, where there were mainly Japanese tourists. There were always Japanese tourists at St. John the Divine. On the afternoon Quintana got married at St. John the Divine there had been Japanese tourists snapping pictures as she and Gerry left the altar. On the afternoon we placed John’s ashes in the chapel off the main altar at St. John the Divine an empty Japanese tour bus had caught fire and burned outside, a pillar of flame on Amsterdam Avenue. On Christmas Day the chapel off the main altar was blocked off, part of the cathedral reconstruction. A security guard took me in. The chapel was emptied, filled only with scaffolding. I ducked under the scaffolding and found the marble plate with John’s name and my mother’s name. I hung the lei from one of the brass rods that held the marble plate to the vault and then I walked from the chapel back into the nave and out the main aisle, straight toward the big rose window.
As I walked I kept my eyes on the window, half blinded by its brilliance but determined to keep my gaze fixed until I caught the moment in which the window as approached seems to explode with light, fill the entire field of vision with blue. The Christmas of the Buffalo pens and the black wafer alarm clock and the neighborhood fireworks all over Honolulu, the Christmas of 1990, the Christmas during which John and I had been doing the crash rewrite on the picture that never got made, had involved that window. We had staged the denouement of the picture at St. John the Divine, placed a plutonium device in the bell tower (only the protagonist realizes that the device is at St. John the Divine and not the World Trade towers), blown the unwitting carrier of the device straight out through the big rose window. We had filled the screen with blue that Christmas.
I realize as I write this that I do not want to finish this account.
Nor did I want to finish the year.
The craziness is receding but no clarity is taking its place.
I look for resolution and find none.
I did not want to finish the year because I know that as the days pass, as January becomes February and February becomes summer, certain things will happen. My image of John at the instant of his death will become less immediate, less raw. It will become something that happened in another year. My sense of John himself, John alive, will become more remote, even “mudgy,” softened, transmuted into whatever best serves my life without him. In fact this is already beginning to happen. All year I have been keeping time by last year’s calendar: what were we doing on this day last year, where did we have dinner, is it the day a year ago we flew to Honolulu after Quintana’s wedding, is it the day a year ago we flew back from Paris, is it the day. I realized today for the first time that my memory of this day a year ago is a memory that does not involve John. This day a year ago was December 31, 2003. John did not see this day a year ago. John was dead.
I was crossing Lexington Avenue when this occurred to me.
I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.
I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.
Let them become the photograph on the table.
Let them become the name on the trust accounts.
Let go of them in the water.
Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of him in the water.
In fact the apprehension that our life together will decreasingly be the center of my every day seemed today on Lexington Avenue so distinct a betrayal that I lost all sense of oncoming traffic.
I think about leaving the lei at St. John the Divine.
A souvenir of the Christmas in Honolulu when we filled the screen with blue.
During the years when people still left Honolulu on the Matson Lines the custom at the moment of departure was to throw leis on the water, a promise that the traveler would return. The leis would get caught in the wake and go bruised and brown, the way the gardenias in the pool filter at the house in Brentwood Park had gone bruised and brown.
The other morning when I woke I tried to remember the arrangement of the rooms in the house in Brentwood Park. I imagined myself walking through the rooms, first on the ground floor and then on the second. Later in the day I realized that I had forgotten one.
The lei I left at St. John the Divine would have gone brown by now.
Leis go brown, tectonic plates shift, deep currents move, islands vanish, rooms get forgotten.
I flew into Indonesia and Malaysia and Singapore with John, in 1979 and 1980.
Some of the islands that were there then would now be gone, just shallows.
I think about swimming with him into the cave at Portuguese Bend, about the swell of clear water, the way it
changed, the swiftness and power it gained as it narrowed through the rocks at the base of the point. The tide had to be just right. We had to be in the water at the very moment the tide was right. We could only have done this a half dozen times at most during the two years we lived there but it is what I remember. Each time we did it I was afraid of missing the swell, hanging back, timing it wrong. John never was. You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that.
PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material.
Columbia University Press: Excerpt from “Re-Grief Therapy” by Dr. Volkan from Bereavement: Its Psychosocial Aspects, edited by Schoenberg, Gerber, Wiener, Kutscher, Peretz, and Carr. Copyright © 1975 by Columbia University Press. Reprinted by permission of Columbia University Press.
Harcourt, Inc. & Faber and Faber Ltd.: Excerpt from “East Coker” in Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot. Copyright © 1940 by T. S. Eliot and renewed 1968 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc. and Faber and Faber Ltd.
Eugene Kennedy: Excerpt from a letter written by Eugene Kennedy to Joan Didion. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Liveright Publishing Company: Excerpt from “Buffalo Bill’s.” Copyright 1923, 1951, © 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1976 by George James Firmage, from Complete Poems: 1904–1962 by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage. Reprinted by permission of Liveright Publishing Company.
Massachusetts Medical Society: Excerpt from “Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest—The Solution Is Shocking” by David J. Callans from The New England Journal of Medicine (August 12, 2004). Copyright © 2004 by Massachusetts Medical Society. Reprinted by permission of Massachusetts Medical Society.
