I wandered into a second-hand bookstore on Capitol Hill in Seattle, Wash. on Jan. 16, 2022, a chilly Sunday evening where I had trekked from Anchorhead Coffee in Pike Plaza. Had it not been for the neon cat sign with its waving tail that beckoned me to the right, I would’ve just strolled past the red brick building—eyes forward—toward the Capitol Hill transit station.
I stood there, looking up at the sign, its Cheshire cat-like glare put me in the shoes of Wonderland’s Alice. Why not? I thought. Partake in this choose-your-own-adventure moment where I can explore this abode as the creeping darkness seeped into the neighborhood; or I can go home and do my usual things with a high percentage of certainty, safety, and predictability.
I wanted an adventure, so I entered stage right.
After browsing through the narrow aisles of poetry, travel, language, and popular fiction, I chatted with Greg and Alana at the counter about Sylvia Plath and Joan Didion. I asked if they have any copies of Didion’s works. Like a street magician, Greg conjured a copy right behind him from a pile of books: her memoir “The Year of Magical Thinking.”
As soon as I got home and got into something more cozy, I saw the world through the eyes and mind of Joan Didion for several hours. She took me right into the moments before her husband’s death, author John Gregory Dunne, who died from a sudden heart attack before dinner. I couldn’t put the book down until it was past midnight. I was stifling a yawn every few paragraphs as Didion reflected on how she didn’t want to give away Dunne’s shoes, thinking that he will need them when he “comes back.”
I put the book down and breathed into my abdomen several times. Even in death, Didion’s writing still evoked past emotions and memories that I had buried for more than 14 years.
Despite New York Times columnist Robert Pinsky’s comment of Didion’s book being “literally terrible,” I think Didion never meant her book to be of Ernest Hemingway’s or Barbara Cully’s forte. When we’re in grief, the rules of grammar and syntax don’t always follow or apply because we likely aren’t thinking logically as we write our thoughts and emotions down. As Pinsky mentioned, which I agree with and had observed within myself, “Grief makes us crazy.”
Perhaps not crazy as in “looney” or something that stigmatizes us as being less valued as a person. When we grieve—coupled with depression and anxiety—we tend to think less reasonably. Sometimes I get that feeling during my own anxious and grieving moments. I liken the happy-go-lucky Tasslehoff Burrfoot from the original Dragonlance Chronicles where he threw a raging fit—a rare emotive display among kenders—immediately after the death of his best friend, the dwarven smith and warrior Flint Fireforge. The wave passes, and he sobs in the arms of his friend Tanis Half-Elven.
Life changes fast.
Life changes in the inside.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
The question of self-pity.
Joan Didion, first words of “The Year of Magical Thinking.”
Didion’s concise citations of events (the when, where, and who) that had happened in her life and recollections of various events are quite similar to how I catalogue my own recordings of personal and news events. Maybe we both have an obsession with dates, coupled with our journalistic spirits? Or a way for us to remember what makes our lives more meaningful so that what had transpired wasn’t a delusion or confabulation?
In one passage about her daughter Quintana Roo Dunne’s second hospitalization, Didion wrote:
“March 25, 2004. Ten minutes past seven in the evening in New York.
“She had come back from a place where doctors said, ‘We still don’t know where this is gong’ and now she was there again.
“For all I knew it had already gone the wrong way.
“They could have told Gerry and Gerry could be trying to absorb before calling me.
“She could already be on her way to the hospital morgue.
“Alone. On a gurney. With a transporter.
“I had already imagined this scene, with John.” (p. 91)
Proper grammar couldn’t capture the emotions and thoughts of Didion at the time of her writing. Proper grammar couldn’t set the mood at the level Didion wanted to reveal, her vulnerability and grief at the same time. Sometimes grief can invoke a level of creativity within us, and amplify among those who are already creative, like those who are already making something original everyday.
Proper grammar would’ve flushed her voice to genericism, rendering a narrative that holds almost no individualism, another 500-word news story.
Didion mentioned that people who grieve for the loss of a loved one tend to revisit (or haunt, as I prefer to call it) the places where they lived or fondly visit. Some hope, like she did, that the person will return, and continue to accompany them on their life journey. I did that a few times with one of my past partners who passed away in December 2010, a year after we broke up. In the year or two after her death, I revisited the apartments where we lived together, the restaurants where we used to dine, and one hospital where she used to work as a nurse.
Like Didion, I had hoped that she would open the door if I were to knock on the apartment door. I had hoped she would walk through the automatic door of the hospital where I used to pick her up. I had asked myself, “Did she exist? Did our relationship actually happen? Was this an illusion that she no longer exists?”
Did I exist?
“The Year of Magical Thinking” brought questions about my own griefs, past and future. It’s something I carry along, much like how those with chronic pain and trauma cope and carry on with their lives the best they can. As my friend Kris Leong, who has complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS), said to me recently, “It’s not all sad, I’m living the best life possible with this travel companion. We found a way to work together because there was no other choice. I don’t remember what it is like to not live with pain. But I do remember all the fun things I’ve done with it.”