Joan Didion - The Year of Magical Thinking

It's too weird to be mere coincidence. On Wednesday, I started reading (and read most of) Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. That same night, our bunny Kuromi and my longtime friend Mel died.

I remember describing this book to Jon, in those ignorant hours before the two deaths, as "Stewart-Lee-ish" in its use of repetition. In the book, Didion revisits the night her husband died repeatedly, coming at it from two dozen angles, circling around it. She tries, again and again, to come up with a complete account of the event. But where to start? Where to end? 

Death changes so much about the past. Little details suddenly appear to be portents and omens. The time he forgot to bring his index cards. His doctor's words: "It's called a widowmaker, pal." A disagreement about buying a house in Hawaii. These tiny incidents become horribly symbolic, suggesting points in time during which you could have responded differently and changed fate. 

Other things in daily life becomes sharply sweet on hindsight. Even as an outsider to the marriage, I will find it hard to forget, for instance, the summer afternoons Didion and her husband spent swimming, gardening, and watching Tenko, or the times he waited for her to finish work to have late dinners together.

In the wake of the two deaths in my life, my mind goes zigzagging through time. Fragments everywhere. Like Didion reviewing building security logs and medical reports, I find myself relying heavily on the timestamped messages on my phone. 

4 January, 6.21pm. Mel's last text:

Hello pal I'm back at Assisi
Long story
But willing to
So it's fine
:-)
Not sure I want to hang out on sat and sun yet
It will be nice
Maybe best next week

She meant Assisi Hospice, the place she stayed in November. This was after a stint in hospital when she was supposed to undergo chemotherapy, but her body responded so badly to it, they had to stop. Thereafter, since she wasn't on any treatment, she was moved to Assisi. There was a strong sense of being put out to pasture, because Assisi was hotel-like, all warm wood and air-con, seemingly pleasant until you realise that all the windows are sealed and there is no way out.

She hated staying at Assisi despite it being "nice" and staffed by nice young people in something like a 1:1 ratio. It was really just a death facility, a human abattoir in a boutique hotel. Because Assisi had no visiting hours, she was never alone. Can you imagine that? People hanging about you at all hours, constantly expecting you to die, and you never getting a break from being a charity case?

So I was surprised to learn she went back. Willingly, even. Since when, I asked. Since Monday noon, she wrote. I later learnt from Van that Mel had attempted to go to hospital A&E, but she wasn't accepted (?), so she went to Assisi instead.

I wonder if she meant to die. I feel she might have, because we had talked about death at length. She had already been through many near-death episodes during her 2-month stint with stage 4 cancer, but each time, she told me, she refused to die. It's not that she was afraid. She just would not have settled for anything less than a peaceful, euphoric death. Was that why she blew me off? Or did she honestly believe she'd be around next week?

Did she know, already, when she sent me that text postponing our next meeting? Didion, in The Year of Magical Thinking:

death, even if sudden or accidental, “gives warning of its arrival.” Gawain is asked: “Ah, good my lord, think you then so soon to die?” Gawain answers: “I tell you that I shall not live two days.”

That evening, Jon found Kuromi dead. I am sorry I wasn't there for him. He had to watch the heartbreaking spectacle of Eeyore finding out (frantic circling, humping). I could not reconcile her body, that taxidermied-looking thing laid out on the towel, with the real-life version of her. 

The next morning I woke up, not having slept much, to a message from Mel's father:

Clara
Mel left peacefully this morning
1:30am
Please inform Vanessa

A cool customer: that's what Joan Didion's social worker or doctor calls her at the point of breaking the news about her husband. She's composed, practical, competent, even as her world falls apart.

Coolness is culturally induced, at least in the Anglosphere, by the modern phobia of death, wrote Joan Didion. Anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer

had described this rejection of public mourning as a result of the increasing pressure of a new "ethical duty to enjoy oneself" [...] the contemporary trend was "to treat mourning as morbid self-indulgence, and to give social admiration to the bereaved who hide their grief so fully that no one would guess anything had happened."