Joan Didion, the American writer, is a wisp of a thing. Weighing around 100 pounds with bird-like bones, she looks like she would be crushed if you hugged her or blown away in the wind before you had a chance to get a good grasp on her. In her eyes, however, you see the steely resolve and grit that manifests itself in her writing and, most recently, spurred her to write about suddenly losing her husband of 40 years, John Gregory Dunne, to a massive heart attack. In 2005's The Year of Magical Thinking, she lays out the year after his death, her dealings with grief and how society treats it and how she copes with her ingrained fear of catastrophe during a clearly catastrophic event. How do you go ahead with life when you don't want to go with it?
Didion was born in Sacramento, California in 1934, known most for her wry observations, particularly about the 1960s culture in her home state. Having lived in California, I can see how she ended up with a sense of the dramatic, a key trait for a writer; it is a state full of paranoia amidst total freedom to express it. People can be whatever they want but they all know the land they occupy may just fall into the ocean one day so live aloud. There are quite a few people who believe in conspiracies and other such nonsense, some innately or some eventually succumbing to the constant cloud of "rightness" whether logical or not. And for someone like Didion who is quietly introspective, that world is ripe for review and critique. I am not surprised she moved to the harder-edged New York City, where she can hide and watch and eventually discuss without the loud Californian way of being out every day, all the time. She is a woman I would like to meet at a cafe somewhere and share a coffee with a dash of whiskey.
I read Didion's book on a plane to Florida, to my mother's vacation home on a golf course on which she was so excited to play, to her parents who didn't attend the funeral, to their house where we used to fish off their dock, to tell my grandmother for the first time how she died. I hesitated buying it because I was trying to retain some sort of composure and resolve knowing the tough five days I had ahead of me. Did I want to make myself cry yet again? But I realized after reading it, that I needed it. I needed someone to talk to me about grief, a distance away not holding my hand but engaging my mind to face it and process it, something I had been avoiding. If she could face it bravely, so could I.
One aspect of grief that Didion talked about often is how life after losing someone significant goes ever so slightly off-center. After the funeral occurs and the calls of sympathy stop, normal life doesn't return to normal but remains askew; in so many ways, something is just not right but it goes deeper than the lack of someone's physical presence, that hollowness. My description of this feeling I liken to going to sit back in a chair and realizing it is not there; I get this swell of panic as I collect myself to avoid a fall, thinking the world was not as I presumed it to be and for that split second, I don't know why. Then, of course, you realize why. Grief does come in those waves people talk about, lingering longer or shorter with no control over when that feeling will leave you. Didion describes a dose of this when 
she visits old haunts that remind her of her husband, fleeing one Boston press conference as a way to escape the memories that flood in. I had this panicky feeling in Florida looking at Christmas lights that I realized were glowing too brightly or suddenly seeing all these lizards running over trees that I had never noticed before, the world was different. Didion also talks about seeing the rawness and vulnerability in the face of people grieving, identifying members of this unspoken club from across the room. I would say the look is more of contained surprise from the shock of realizing the free-fall panic doesn't wear off the few hours after someone dies. It comes back again and again in reminders of that person and that the world is not right and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. There is also anger, guilt and just a deep sense of sadness. These aren't the gentle warm waves of the Caribbean Sea but frigid salty waves that bang you emotionally up against rocks.
"I think about swimming with him into the cave at Portuguese Bend, about the swell of clear water, the way it changed, the swiftness and power it gained as it narrowed through the rocks at the base of the point," Didion wrote in her last paragraph in the book. "The tide had to be just right. We had to be in the water at the very moment the tide was right. We could only have done this a half dozen times at most during the two years we lived there but it is what I remember. Each time we did it I was afraid of missing the swell, hanging back, timing it wrong. John never was. 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." So Didion, the little sparrow, lets out a loud cry to let it go--death is normal, grief is normal, the weirdness of life after death is normal and the best we can do is to remember to keep swimming.
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