Overcoming the Exclusion of Grief: The Year of Magical Thinking

Overcoming the Exclusion of Grief: The Year of Magical Thinking

             In Becoming Human, Jean Vanier states: "Fear is at the root of all forms of exclusion, just as trust is at the root of all forms of inclusion" (71). He recognizes that fear drives people to exclude others, and that people need to get rid of their fear and accept their situation to become inclusive. The Year of Magical Thinking examines Joan Didion's life in the year following the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross notes the five stages of loss and grief in her 1969 book “On Death and Dying.” First: "Denial and Isolation," second: "Anger," third: "Bargaining," fourth: "Depression," fifth: "Acceptance." Didion also follows this step after the death of her husband. Dunne's death suddenly comes and afterward, Didion realizes that she cannot accept the loss of her husband even though she arranges his funeral and starts to make the notes about her feelings. She tries to remember her memories with her husband and begins to have "magical thinking." This is shown when she believes that her husband will need shoes when he comes back home, or when she believes her wish will bring him back to her. A year after Dunne's death, their memories are still on her mind each day, but the truth of the autopsy and the progression of time allows her to overcome the fear of accepting the loss of her husband. As Vanier expresses in his quote, she now stops her delusive dreaming and accepts reality. Her feelings of fear teach her to come to grow up mentally and allow her to move past her grief. In The Year of Magical Thinking written by Joan Didion, the death of Didion's husband leads her to exclusion due to her unwillingness to accept the loss of her husband. However, as time passes, she moves past her grief when she accepts the loss of her husband and comes back to reality.

             Her exclusion begins when her husband suddenly dies on one night and she realizes that she does not accept the loss of her husband, despite having arranged his funeral. The book begins with four significant sentences: "Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity" (Didion 3). This describes Didion's feeling on the day of the loss of her husband. Late December before Christmas, Joan Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, go to the hospital to see their daughter Quintana Roo Dunne. Quintana is hospitalized with what seemed to be a flu at first, then pneumonia, and then complete septic shock. She is put into an induced coma and placed in the intensive care unit. After they arrive home, while her husband is sitting down for dinner, he suddenly dies from a heart attack. She states: "[A]t approximately nine o’clock on the evening of December 30, 2003, my husband, John Gregory Dunne, appeared to (or did) experience, at the table where he and I had just sat down to dinner in the living room of our apartment in New York, a sudden massive coronary event that caused his death" (6-7). While the paramedics move her husband to the hospital, she is in chaos. She states that she has "no memory of sirens. I have no memory of traffic. When we arrived at the emergency entrance to the hospital the gurney was already disappearing into the building" (13). Dunne dies shortly after he arrives at the hospital. For 40 years, Didion and Dunne share their lives and work. Even though she arranges the funeral for her husband, she does not accept his death, as revealed when she utters, "I remember thinking that I needed to discuss this with John. There was nothing I did not discuss with John. Because we were both writers and both worked at home our days were filled with the sound of each other's voice" (16). She tries to overcome her grief, but it is not like what she expects it to be: "Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be . . . Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life" (26). She is consumed by memories of living in Los Angeles, and realizes that she has now entered a state of temporary derangement. Jean Vanier expresses: "We are all so frightened of losing what is important for us … We are frightened of change" (73). Even though she arranges the funeral of her husband, she does not accept the death of her husband which represents the beginning of her denial—exclusion—of her loss.

             Subsequently, Didion pushes herself further into exclusion due to her "magical thinking." She tries to open her mind and to accept the loss of her husband. Jean Vanier notes: "To be open is an enormously risky enterprise … you risk the chaos of loneliness" (79). However, she fails and this also allows her to have the magical thinking: "After that first night I would not be alone for weeks . . . but I needed that first night to be alone. I needed to be alone so that he could come back. This was the beginning of my year of magical thinking" (Didion 33). She understands her husband's death in her mind, but does not understand with her heart. She utters: "I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome" (35). Didion starts to believe that her wish will bring her husband back to her, "magically." This results in her not being able to give away her husband's shoes since she believes that he will need them when he returns. Even though she arranges for the autopsy, cremation, and the placement of his ashes, she does not accept the death of her husband with her heart. At this time, Didion states: "People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness" (74). Several weeks later, Didion avoids looking at the photographs of her marriage that hang in the hallway. When her daughter Quintana wakes from her coma, Didion tells her about the death of her father. Shortly after, Didion suddenly realizes that she faces the possibility of losing her daughter right after the death of her husband and she cries: "I wanted more than a night of memories and sighs. I wanted to scream. I wanted him back" (75). She must believe Quintana will get better as bad events are bound to follow good events. She decides to go on the trip with her daughter as the starting point of her new life. Now, she decides to go to the trip with her daughter to overcome her grief, but she fails and the grief worsens.

             She loses her mind due to her mourning, but moves one step closer to inclusion when she tries to overcome her grief by joining the Democratic convention in Boston, and reading an autopsy report of her husband. Her grief turns into mourning and she states: "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" (Didion 143). During the end of 2004, Didion agrees to participate in the Democratic convention for the New York Review of Books because she believes that it would help to get her back to a normal life. However, it reminds her of her husband, yet again. Sometime after he dies, she speaks to him as if he were there, imagining how their conversation would naturally occur. She still does not get rid of all traces of her husband as revealed when she notes: "The voice on my answering machine is still John’s. The fact that it was his in the first place was arbitrary, having to do with who was around on the day the answering machine last needed programming, but if I needed to retape it now I would do so with a sense of betrayal" (153). Since Dunne dies, Didion writes the notes about her feeling as a writer. She starts to write a book based upon her notes. Didion receives the autopsy report of her husband and realizes that, "Only after I read the autopsy report did I begin to believe what I had been repeatedly told: nothing he or I had done or not done had either caused or could have prevented his death" (206). Here, her grief begins to change into mourning, and she realizes that she is losing her mind. She tries to live a normal life by joining the Democratic convention in Boston, but it makes her situation worse. After she reads the autopsy report, she accepts that no one is responsible for her husband's death.

             Didion finally accepts the loss of her husband about a year after his death. When her memories of her husband slowly decrease, she gets rid of her fear of accepting her loss of Dunne's death. When she buys new Christmas lights to replace the ones that are not working, they serve as a symbol of her faith in the future. Soon, she realizes that: "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" (Didion 225). This quotation represents her memory, of this day one year ago, without her husband. Yes, he is dead. Over time, Didion realizes that her memories with him are slowly fading. She worries that her memories of their life together will fade and she feels betrayal, like Didion intones: "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" (226). The progression of time allows her memories with her husband to fade slowly and her fear of losing memories also disappears. Jean Vanier notes: "How easy it is to fall into the illusion of a beautiful world when we have lost trust in our capacity to make of our broken world a place that can become more beautiful" (81). Didion easily falls into "magical thinking" believing that her wish will bring her husband back due to her broken world—the life without her husband. Eventually, she accepts the death of her husband and becomes inclusive with it. Didion ends the book with her memory that one day her husband says to her: "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" (Didion 227). Didion decides to follow her husband's advice about her life changing, and eventually, she moves past her grief.

             In Joan Didion's memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion does not accept her husband's death which leads her to exclusion due to the fear of becoming lonely. However, the progression of time allows her to overcome her grief, and accept the death of her husband, allowing her to become inclusive. In Elizabeth Kubler-Ross' 1969 book “On Death and Dying,” there are five stages of loss and grief. First: "Denial and Isolation," second: "Anger," third: "Bargaining," fourth: "Depression," fifth: "Acceptance." Didion does not accept the loss of her husband even though she arranges the funeral and starts to have the "magical thinking," such as her wish will bring her husband back. She calms herself down to make the notes about her feelings. Didion thinks that bad events are bound to follow good events, therefore, she believes this will allow her daughter to get better. However, she begins to lose her mind because of her grief, and begins mourning. Eventually, after she reads the autopsy of Dunne, she accepts her loss. As time passes, her memories with her husband slowly fade, and her fear of being alone also disappears. Jean Vanier states: "To lost the 'known' and to move on to the 'unknown' can mean a terrible loss for us. To live such loss one needs a great deal of inner strength" (80). Didion loses her husband—known—and falls in grief—unknown—and it is a terrible loss for her. However, her feelings of fear teach her to grow mentally, eventually, moving past her grief. Her mind and heart move from exclusion to inclusion since she faces her fear and accepts the loss of her husband. Everybody pretends not to accept fearful things and excludes them. People need to open up their heart to overcome their fear, and accept them like Didion does.

Works Cited

Didion, Joan. The Year of Magical Thinking. 1st ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.
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Gideon, Lewis-Kraus. "'The Year of Magical Thinking' by Joan Didion." Los Angeles
             Times. Los Angeles Times, 03 Oct. 2005. Web. 07 Apr. 2016.

McCrum, Robert. "The 100 Best Nonfiction Books: No 2 – The Year of Magical Thinking
             by Joan Didion (2005)." The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 08 February
             2016. Web. 03 Apr. 2016.

Vanier, Jean. "From Exclusion to Inclusion: A Path of Healing." Becoming Human.
             Toronto: House of Anansi Press Inc., 2008. 69-103. Print.