I was prescribed The Year of Magical Thinking by my therapist shortly after experiencing the loss of my mother. Unlike Didion’s sudden loss of her husband, sitting down to dinner and life as she knew it ending, I lost my mother over time. She was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer in 2016. It had metastasized everywhere conceivable. For three years I watched her gradual and then rapid decline, culminating in a week in the hospital, and then her eventual death in September 2019.
Ironically mirroring the title, it took me over a year to fully digest the emotional weight of Didion’s words. I began reading a year removed from my mother’s death. I was shocked at the depth of her grief, and yet strangely validated. I was not alone. I was also taken with Didion’s constant repetition of certain phrases, genuinely reflecting a mind drowning in grief as it constantly returns to phrases, memories, and regrets, over and over again. Didion’s opening passage is her echo throughout the entire work: “Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant. … You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity.” Didion’s husband suffered a massive cardiac event during a dinner conversation. The paramedics took him away and pronounced him dead at the hospital. My mother had fallen on her way to the bathroom and fractured her femur and hip. The paramedics took her away and she was pronounced dead at the hospital a week later. They never came home. Life changes in the instant.
During my year+ endeavor to finally finish, I would read a series of chapters and pages, and then be overcome with grief – sometimes her grief, sometimes my own, but oftentimes a marriage of the two. I would read at my bed, when late evenings turned into early mornings, sobbing softly. I would set the book down, sometimes for even months at a time, and would then have to re-read and re-experience her memories, just as she does in the text. For over a year, both Didion and I struggled to recall the events transpiring in her life, traveling backwards and forwards through her words and through time. In between passages, I’d reflect on my life. The week my mother spent in the hospital felt like a lifetime. Some details are painfully in focus, while others have blurred to the point I can no longer trust them. Sometimes I can’t remember my mother’s voice. Sometimes I fixate on one of the last phrases she spoke to me: “Thank you, sweetheart.” She said this after I took a plate from her, sitting in her chair, swollen and tired – and grateful. That is my phrase that echoes throughout my life.
Didion’s thoughts repeat. Her husband’s thoughts and past writings repeat. Other writings from other authors that have shaped her through the years repeat. In my own life and personal writings, I’ve started to repeat her as well. The quote has changed to fit my needs, as our memories of the departed also seem to do. The passage originally describes a prompt for a crossword, “6 Down, ‘Sometimes you feel like…’ I instantly saw the obvious answer, a good one that would fill many spaces and prove my competency for the day: ‘a motherless child.’” This was then reduced in my mind to “sometimes you feel… like a motherless child,” and then finally simplified to “sometimes you feel like a motherless child.” This phrase has filled my Instagram posts and comments, short blog and diary posts, and my many background thoughts. It’s something so simple, yet so profoundly encapsulates my experience. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, because I am now a motherless child. Sometimes I hate those who still have their mothers, because I am a motherless child. And with all of the abuse that came before, haven’t I always been a motherless child? Didion’s crossword answer comes from a song I’m unfamiliar with: Blind Willie Johnson's Motherless Children Have a Hard Time. “Motherless children have a real hard time / Motherless children have such a real hard time,” Didion remembers, Didion concludes. The question of self-pity. Many of my breaks from the text came from me being overwhelmed with Didion’s grieving of her husband, and yet dealing with a daughter fighting for her life at the same time. What if she lost Quintana, too?* What of wives? What of mothers? What of Didion’s real hard time? What of the children-less mothers? Aren’t I the one with self-pity now?
Before I even knew of her memoir, I wrote my own Year of Magical Thinking, beginning in the August of my mother’s steep decline, and spanning the first year since her passing. In form, it resembles more of Roland Barthes’ Mourning Diary, spanning his thoughts while grieving his mother – another motherless child. Like his, my entries are often dated. Some are quite short, while others span many pages. Some reference past entries, and some repeat phrases over and over again. And yet I did not have to spend over a year mourning with Barthes. I grieved with him for a week, possibly two at the most, and then picked up Didion’s accounts. But the emotional weight of Magical Thinking has stayed with me. And it’s become all the more present given her own recent passing.
Throughout the memoir, Didion struggles to construct an accurate time table of her husband’s death. When did they reach the hospital? How long did the paramedics stay in their apartment? Her concept of time constricts and contorts, compounded by her only daughter’s concurrent and extended stay in the ICU. Didion refers to these moments as “cognitive deficits.” My own timeline of my mother and my life have permanently warped as well. Events and trips that I swore took place in 2019… were actually in 2018. The objects in the mirror are closer than they appear. How long was her week in the hospital? A full week? Or was it four days? Grief’s mirror and its deficits cannot be trusted.
Life changes in the instant – the ordinary instant. Grief is a constant repetition. Grief informs the message. The medium makes the message. Grief is both the medium and the message. Grief informs the writing, reading, and feeling of the message. From Didion, “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.” I thought I was prepared for my mother’s death, but even with my years to prepare, I wasn’t. I had no idea what I would face until I was finally there. I was 24. I was twenty-five. When Didion was twenty-two she read Caitlin Thomas’ book mourning her husband. Didion had read Caitlin’s words and dismissed it as whining self-pity. In the margins I wrote if only we could know before we knew, informed by a passage Didion wrote many pages ago: “Nor can we know… (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning.” Didion and other writers describe the “look” of grief, the haunting and vacant stare that follows. Even before my mother officially passed, I had that stare of not being altogether there. Just as Didion returns time and time again to the moments just before John passed, I return to my time in the hospital with my mother. I am still there holding her hand. “You’re safe, I remember whispering to Quintana when I first saw her in the ICU at UCLA. I’m here. You’re going to be alright.” When I held my mother’s hand, I gave her permission to finally pass. I told her that I would be alright.
I was unfortunate to grieve my mother’s first year of death during the onset of the pandemic. But even before social isolation hit the rest of the world, I was already isolated in my grief. While Didion’s friends gave her meals and watched over her, much like my father’s friends with him, I was largely abandoned. The question of self-pity, Didion says. “People in grief think a great deal about self-pity. ... We fear that our actions will reveal the condition tellingly described as ‘dwelling on it.’” But how could I not dwell on it? And why couldn’t they understand? “Visible mourning reminds us of death, which is construed as unnatural, a failure to manage the situation.” While I was finally finishing the final chapters, I listened to Damon Albarn's The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows, its title taken from John Clare’s poem Love and Memory. Damon sings, “It's fruitless for me to mourn you / But who can help mourning?” Who can help but be overcome with grief? With self-pity? Who can help but continuously mourn after losing their mother? Who can help but feel like a motherless child?
I mourned my mother long before she officially died, ever since she was diagnosed. My mother mourned her past life, and the life she thought she would have. The years spent between her diagnosis and eventual death were those in limbo. Didion’s concept of death is informed by her experience with her husband. Death is black and white to her, even for those who have finally passed from long illness. “In each of those long illnesses the possibility of death had been in the picture… [but] when it came, [there was] 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.” My own concept of death is informed by my experience – my mother’s experience. I am drawn to Roland Barthes' October 27th entry, “You have never known a Woman’s body! / I have known the body of my mother, sick and then dying.” My mother sick and suffering with cancer for years, and then dying. My mother delaying death with radiation and chemotherapy, which also in turn killed her. My mother unconsciousness after surgery, yet still hanging on to the last thread of life for days that seemed to drag for years. Sick and then dying. Slow and prolonged death is not “white.” For me, there is a grey. My mother spent years in grey. My mother spent her final week in grey. My mother eventually, finally, died. For Didion it is a “misleading suggestion of release, relief, resolution,” but for my mother and for my family, her actual moment of death was a celebration. My mother was finally freed from cancer, and from the horrible pain it had given her. “Profound relief,” I wrote the morning my mother finally passed. Profound relief. Cancer is its own place none of us know until it curses someone we love. Cancer is hell. “I pray this never happens to you,” my mother told me. That too echoes in my mind.
Didion and I also disagree on the concepts of grieving and mourning – again, informed by our own experiences. “Until now I had only been able to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.” But in my experience, mourning happened. My mother's life as she knew it ended. It ended in the ordinary instant of her diagnosis. “What is it? Cancer?” my mother had asked her doctor, sarcastic. But then it was cancer. And life as she knew it ended. Grief is active. Grief is happening now. I am still grieving. I will never stop grieving. By Didion's definition I've never mourned because I've never “dealt” with grief. Because there is no room for me to focus elsewhere. Maybe it’s easier if things are “black” and “white.” When people are alive and then dead. Maybe that kind of view is wishful thinking – magical thinking. My experiences are grey, informed by my personal grief and my mother’s prolonged death. I have known my mother, sick and then dying.
“How could he come back if they took his organs, how could he come back if he had no shoes?” Didion asks, still fresh in her grief. “I stood there for a moment, then realized why: he would need shoes if he was to return.” These are words of magical thinking, desperate to keep John alive. “I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us,” Didion concludes in her final pages. The magical thinking made me dream for months about my mother, magical dreams where she had miraculously survived. In these dreams, we could right wrongs and speak the things left unsaid. My own magical thinking so we could forgive each other.
Like Didion, I kept time with the calendar the year my loved one died. And like Didion, as I wrote and as I read, I realized “that I do not want to finish this account. Nor do I want to finish the year. … I look for resolution and find none.” We don’t know grief until we face it ourselves. It happens in the instant, the ordinary instant, and life as we know it ends. My 2019 calendar still hangs beside the current year. I am still there in 2019.
The question of self-pity. Who cares about self-pity? I have known my mother, sick and then dying. The question of self-pity? Sometimes, you feel like a motherless child.
* At the time of writing, I had not yet begun reading Blue Nights, and had not yet learned of Quintana’s fate. I am now… and I am suffering.