Grief: Second Sight & Joan Didion’s Magic Time
I didn’t know Joan Didion, but thanks to New York friends who did, I met her a couple times. Once at a mutual friend’s birthday party: we ended up sitting next to each other on a window seat, apart from the crowd and party noise. She said in her soft voice, “You find yourself waiting for the moment when you can escape these things.”
We emailed briefly about the loss of our husbands, each of us having been widowed by a sudden death. I told her how I could not cry when my husband died of a heart attack, like hers - but how I fell apart when a little dog drowned in the pool around that time. She responded with a story about cleaning out her daughter’s apartment after her death. She too had not cried at the loss of her husband and child. ( She recounts in The Year of Magical Thinking how the ER doctor called her a “cool customer” on the night of the heart attack.) But when she was cleaning her daughter Quintana’s apartment and opened a closet, she told me how a beloved dead dog's leash fell into her hands and she suddenly sank to the floor holding it, sobbing.
Grief blindsides some of us into howling extremes, loud weeping at the moment of loss –then lies in wait for others – powerful emotion triggered suddenly by a dog’s leash, a child’s question, a familiar song,-- knocking us to the floor weeks, months, even years after a death. (The Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders , the DSM, had it all wrong for many years, noting that survivors grieved typically for a few months only. Now that time has been extended, but still is unrealistic. Grief has no clock or calendar, no one can describe its duration for any of us. My husband has been gone for years, but I still grieve, in my way. There is no “typical” mourning period – I still wear a widow’s black dress, if only in my mind.
Shock, of course. Shock lasts far longer (like grief) than we tend to assume. Again, Joan Didion’s “in shock” demeanor at the hospital where her husband had been taken after his heart attack. They called her a “cool customer” because of her seeming lack of emotional reaction. .Didion called it “magical thinking” – in which grief situates itself , floats free outside of time. In The Year of Magical Thinking, at her husband’s funeral, she focuses on keeping her
husband’s shoes for him to wear when he “returns”. This is shock, lasting as shock can, into the future. There is another stranger manifestation of grief that might be described as premonition or “seeing the future.”
In a piece I wrote for “Oprah” magazine, called “In a Heartbeat”, a year after my husband David died, I tried to make sense of a “voice” I heard in my dreams, night after night, David sleeping beside me. When I finally understood the word the voice was saying (it was “heart”) and told David that I’d been able to decipher it, he immediately interpreted this as a “warning” to me, because of a history of heart disease in my family. (Too late, heart disease was discovered in his own family, months after his death.)
From the “Oprah” piece:
In the months before David died, I woke sometimes at night, my heart beating rapidly filled with anxiety Now I wondered, Had I intuited something as David lay next to me in bed? Intuited something about David's heart-and then internalized it? My friend the neuroscientist Dr. Antonio Damasio told me it is possible that a sleeping person could register the irregular heartbeat of a partner lying next to her -- the unconscious brain could record and store an aberrant pattern of beats.
In the surge of poems that began to flow weeks after David's death, I wrote: (This was from a poem called “Heart” from my book of poems called “Sparrow”, published in 2003 -)
...Something
woke me, night after night -- insistent,
reverberant -- a word
finally understood outside conjuncture:
heart. Instead of turning
to you, breathing next to me in the bed,
I put my hand on my own
chest, my own pulse. I listened to the
hurried beats -- thought, afraid,
about the moving phrase of light on the
wall that I could not, at that time,
begin to decipher.
I'D SENSED SOMETHING, IT WAS TRUE. Late at night I'd heard the word heart as if a voice made of thunder, a strange below-the-surface dream voice, were speaking it -- but I never thought it might be David's heart that was failing.
I connected this. “message” to my consciousness as a writer in the same magazine piece:
WHAT WE DO WHEN WE WRITE REMAINS A MYSTERY. The imagination is a force, a guidance system, an ungovernable power. It heats up a combination of elements from life and from dreams -- with a flash of inspiration -- and out of this furnace steps invention. We are so used to news stories, firsthand accounts, eyewitness testimony -- what we think of as the "authentic," it-really-happened like-this reality But the imaginative process that produces poems and narratives and novels (as well as the great transformational style of stage acting my husband loved most) may bring to light a deeper truth about our lives. This is what is so difficult to explain.
Somewhere in my unconscious I interpreted the clues of my everyday life, then the clues rose into that other dimension of imagining. We cannot as writers not take in what we see. The clues themselves are just details that strike us, stay with us -- a look on someone's face, a shadow falling suddenly a moment of imbalance, a spoon falling from a saucer. We cannot as writers turn away It is this access to the unconscious that keeps charging the engine of creativity Art says all we cannot say on this earth, all we are afraid to acknowledge in our lives.
And what a writer does is simply an intensification of what everyone alive does. We all tell ourselves the story of our lives as we go along. We all edit and reconstruct, denying what we can't bear to acknowledge; we heighten what we wish to heighten, making it work, making "sense" of the "facts," helping ourselves go on. In telling our stories, we deny death, we defy death.
As Joan Didion wrote unforgettably, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” And, in my case, I told a story that imagined a death, which turned out to be a “foretelling” of my own husband’s death.
In my novel, entitled Life After Death (the title chosen by my Random House editor before David’s death), I imagined a character named Russell Schaeffer, a handsome, wealthy nonconformist, a tennis afficionado married to the novel’s narrator, who dies suddenly on a tennis court of a heart attack.
I asked David, who was a passionate, obsessed tennis player, about the possibility of someone collapsing on the court in the way my character had. He said it seemed plausible -- tennis is a truly exhausting cardiovascular exercise. A cardiologist friend concurred: A person with undiagnosed coronary artery disease could "irritate" the heart with too strenuous exercise and precipitate arrhythmia. So I gave my character Russell coronary heart disease -- an essentially inoperable case, then let him add the deadly heart speed and play his tennis game. And yet, despite all my research, I remember thinking how unreal Russell's demise seemed to me, how unlikely! My conscious mind denied what the unconscious was telling it.
I spoke to the physician who'd examined David for his pre-Rose Red physical. She chirped on about his "low blood pressure" and his "good, strong heartbeat." Then I recalled how I once leaned against David's chest as we sat up in bed together reading, then pulled away How rapidly how forcefully his heart seemed to be beating, I said. He smiled his unforgettable smile and pointed to his chest. "Strong heart," he said with a grin, "strong heart."
No -- his was not a strong heart, rather a heart so compromised that its very defining function, the pumping of blood, was a struggle. Why hadn't I thought more about that moment, considered why a heart at rest was beating like that? I suppose because when I looked at him worried, he laughed at me, brushing my fears aside. But I believe that this fear resurfaced in a kind of fictional equation. Art equaled life, and transformed the burden of unconscious knowledge.
In the middle of David’s large beautiful funeral, I suddenly remembered my novel, remembered the similarity of the character’s death and David’s. After the funeral, after the many guests and relatives staying in our home for days finally left - I talked to my editor, (the late Dan Menaker,) who told me that I could withdraw the novel, but finally convinced me that I should allow its publication.
I was, as said, in shock, and not thinking clearly. Now I believe I should have withdrawn the novel, because no matter how hard I tried not to, I felt abiding guilt - as if I’d written his death into being.
I recalled, bitterly, the time I’d shouted at David to “Drop dead” in the middle of a heated argument - just as the novel’s narrator flings the same damning words in a fury at her husband.
Had I known how my novel was going to be reviewed in the New York Times Book Review,
I would definitely have withdrawn it. It was, (I used to joke ironically, after a year or two ) “the worst review ever written”. Not because it was so negative, though it was hardly completely positive, but because the reviewer, Kathryn Harrison, also “twinned” me with the novel’s narrator and “our” call to our spouses to “drop dead”. (She even noted in an aside, that my husband had died in the same manner the husband-character in the novel had expired.) But the worst was the review’s headline, which read, “No Sooner Said!’, making certain that there was no confusion about who wielded the power of words – and death.
I still cannot bear to open that book - not because of that cruel review. (which did indeed “sink” the novel) but because I continue to wonder about grief and “second sight” and what I knew without “knowing”. My late husband was a startlingly handsome man, who looked strong, healthy and athletic, which he was – and wasn’t. But like Russell, the novel’s character, he had undiagnosed coronary artery disease. My husband even had had, according to the UCLA forensic pathologist who “re-created” the botched autopsy done in Tacoma, (where his TV movie was being shot) - a previous “silent” heart attack, which scarred and weakened his heart muscle. How could I have known, how could he have known ? Still, did he have symptoms that disturbed him but he didn’t share with me? (But the symptoms of a “silent’ heart attack are fatigue and a stomach ache! Please.) I think my writer’s sense, where imagination is always extra-sensory, knew more than my conscious mind – but wrote an entire novel that maybe was a warning that wasn not heeded.
Or not. I think of a film from the 70’s, that still haunts me. It was called “Don’t Look Now”, starring Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland. It is a tragic drama where visual images are almost characters, their power is so great. The most startling image is a premonition. The film is set in Venice in winter, a shadowy Venice filled with shadow-characters, including a psychic, a “seer” who predicts a death. The Sutherland character, views a funeral barge scene on the water, with his wife and the “seers’ – a vision of his own death about to come. He has been caught up in grief over the drowning of his small daughter a year or so earlier. So much so that he cannot see what is right before him.
Perhaps the message in dreams is always “heart”, for all of us. And time is always out of time as we try to make sense of the clues to our own mortality. Time out of time: second sight and grief.
First, Carol, I am so very sorry for your loss of your husband...
Today, while looking through earlier posts on Cecilia Woloch's Facebook page, I found a link to you...
I have felt these moments in my life, too--those moments when you feel you must immediately write down the messages arriving, just-under your skin...I think that we *transcribe* those messages sent to us. We are *conduits* for this, yes?
Thank you for your vulnerability and generosity in writing--and sharing--this, with us.
First, Carol, I am so very sorry for your loss of your husband...
Today, while looking through earlier posts on Cecilia Woloch's Facebook page, I found a link to you...
I have felt these moments in my life, too--those moments when you feel you must immediately write down the messages arriving, just-under your skin...I think that we *transcribe* those messages sent to us. We are *conduits* for this, yes?
Thank you for your vulnerability and generosity in writing--and sharing--this, with us.