The Year of Magical Thinking (3 page)

And I was.

Until the morning. When, only half awake, I tried to think why I was alone in the bed. There was a leaden feeling. It was the same leaden feeling with which I woke on mornings after John and I had fought. Had we had a fight? What about, how had it started, how could we fix it if I could not remember how it started?

Then I remembered.

For several weeks that would be the way I woke to the day.

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.

One of several lines from different poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins that John strung together during the months immediately after his younger brother committed suicide, a kind of improvised rosary.

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap

May who ne’er hung there.

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.

And I have asked to be

Where no storms come.

I see now that my insistence on spending that first night alone was more complicated than it seemed, a primitive instinct. Of course I knew John was dead. Of course I had already delivered the definitive news to his brother and to my brother and to Quintana’s husband.
The New York Times
knew. The
Los Angeles Times
knew. Yet I was myself in no way prepared to accept this news as final: there was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible. That was why I needed to be alone.

After that first night I would not be alone for weeks (Jim and his wife Gloria would fly in from California the next day, Nick would come back to town, Tony and his wife Rosemary would come down from Connecticut, José would not go to Las Vegas, our assistant Sharon would come back from skiing, there would never not be people in the house), 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.

3.

T
he power of grief to derange the mind has in fact been exhaustively noted. The act of grieving, Freud told us in his 1917 “Mourning and Melancholia,” “involves grave departures from the normal attitude to life.” Yet, he pointed out, grief remains peculiar among derangements: “It never occurs to us to regard it as a pathological condition and to refer it to medical treatment.” We rely instead on “its being overcome after a certain lapse of time.” We view “any interference with it as useless and even harmful.” Melanie Klein, in her 1940 “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States,” made a similar assessment: “The mourner is in fact ill, but because this state of mind is common and seems so natural to us, we do not call mourning an illness…. To put my conclusion more precisely: I should say that in mourning the subject goes through a modified and transitory manic-depressive state and overcomes it.”

Notice the stress on “overcoming” it.

It was deep into the summer, some months after the night when I needed to be alone so that he could come back, before I recognized that through the winter and spring there had been occasions on which I was incapable of thinking rationally. I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome. In my case this disordered thinking had been covert, noticed I think by no one else, hidden even from me, but it had also been, in retrospect, both urgent and constant. In retrospect there had been signs, warning flags I should have noticed. There had been for example the matter of the obituaries. I could not read them. This continued from December 31, when the first obituaries appeared, until February 29, the night of the 2004 Academy Awards, when I saw a photograph of John in the Academy’s “In Memoriam” montage. When I saw the photograph I realized for the first time why the obituaries had so disturbed me.

I had allowed other people to think he was dead.

I had allowed him to be buried alive.

Another such flag: there had come a point (late February, early March, after Quintana had left the hospital but before the funeral that had waited on her recovery) when it had occurred to me that I was supposed to give John’s clothes away. Many people had mentioned the necessity for giving the clothes away, usually in the well-intentioned but (as it turns out) misguided form of offering to help me do this. I had resisted. I had no idea why. I myself remembered, after my father died, helping my mother separate his clothes into stacks for Goodwill and “better” stacks for the charity thrift shop where my sister-in-law Gloria volunteered. After my mother died Gloria and I and Quintana and Gloria and Jim’s daughters had done the same with her clothes. It was part of what people did after a death, part of the ritual, some kind of duty.

I began. I cleared a shelf on which John had stacked sweatshirts, T-shirts, the clothes he wore when we walked in Central Park in the early morning. We walked every morning. We did not always walk together because we liked different routes but we would keep the other’s route in mind and intersect before we left the park. The clothes on this shelf were as familiar to me as my own. I closed my mind to this. I set aside certain things (a faded sweatshirt I particularly remembered him wearing, a Canyon Ranch T-shirt Quintana had brought him from Arizona), but I put most of what was on this shelf into bags and took the bags across the street to St. James’ Episcopal Church. Emboldened, I opened a closet and filled more bags: New Balance sneakers, all-weather shoes, Brooks Brothers shorts, bag after bag of socks. I took the bags to St. James’. One day a few weeks later I gathered up more bags and took them to John’s office, where he had kept his clothes. I was not yet prepared to address the suits and shirts and jackets but I thought I could handle what remained of the shoes, a start.

I stopped at the door to the room.

I could not give away the rest of his shoes.

I stood there for a moment, then realized why: he would need shoes if he was to return.

The recognition of this thought by no means eradicated the thought.

I have still not tried to determine (say, by giving away the shoes) if the thought has lost its power.

O
n reflection I see the autopsy itself as the first example of this kind of thinking. Whatever else had been in my mind when I so determinedly authorized an autopsy, there was also a level of derangement on which I reasoned that an autopsy could show that what had gone wrong was something simple. It could have been no more than a transitory blockage or arrhythmia. It could have required only a minor adjustment—a change in medication, say, or the resetting of a pacemaker. In this case, the reasoning went, they might still be able to fix it.

I recall being struck by an interview, during the 2004 campaign, in which Teresa Heinz Kerry talked about the sudden death of her first husband. After the plane crash that killed John Heinz, she said in the interview, she had felt very strongly that she “needed” to leave Washington and go back to Pittsburgh.

Of course she “needed” to go back to Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh, not Washington, was the place to which he might come back.

The autopsy did not in fact take place the night John was declared dead.

The autopsy did not take place until eleven the next morning. I realize now that the autopsy could have taken place only after the man I did not know at New York Hospital made the phone call to me, on the morning of December 31. The man who made the call was not “my social worker,” not “my husband’s doctor,” not, as John and I might have said to each other, our friend from the bridge. “Not our friend from the bridge” was family shorthand, having to do with how his Aunt Harriet Burns described subsequent sightings of recently encountered strangers, for example seeing outside the Friendly’s in West Hartford the same Cadillac Seville that had earlier cut her off on the Bulkeley Bridge. “Our friend from the bridge,” she would say. I was thinking about John saying “not our friend from the bridge” as I listened to the man on the telephone. I recall expressions of sympathy. I recall offers of assistance. He seemed to be avoiding some point.

He was calling, he said then, to ask if I would donate my husband’s organs.

Many things went through my mind at this instant. The first word that went through my mind was “no.” Simultaneously I remembered Quintana mentioning at dinner one night that she had identified herself as an organ donor when she renewed her driver’s license. She had asked John if he had. He had said no. They had discussed it.

I had changed the subject.

I had been unable to think of either of them dead.

The man on the telephone was still talking. I was thinking: If she were to die today in the ICU at Beth Israel North, would this come up? What would I do? What would I do now?

I heard myself saying to the man on the telephone that my husband’s and my daughter was unconscious. I heard myself saying that I did not feel capable of making such a decision before our daughter even knew he was dead. This seemed to me at the time a reasonable response.

Only after I hung up did it occur to me that nothing about it was reasonable. This thought was immediately (and usefully—notice the instant mobilization of cognitive white cells) supplanted by another: there had been in this call something that did not add up. There had been a contradiction in it. This man had been talking about donating organs, but there was no way at this point to do a productive organ harvest: John had not been on life support. He had not been on life support when I saw him in the curtained cubicle in the emergency room. He had not been on life support when the priest came. All organs would have shut down.

Then I remembered: the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner’s office. John and I had been there together one morning in 1985 or 1986. There had been someone from the eye bank tagging bodies for cornea removal. Those bodies in the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner’s office had not been on life support. This man from New York Hospital, then, was talking about taking only the corneas, the eyes.
Then why not say so? Why misrepresent this to me? Why make this call and not just say “his eyes”?
I took the silver clip the social worker had given me the night before from the box in the bedroom and looked at the driver’s license.
Eyes: BL,
the license read.
Restrictions: Corrective Lenses.

Why make this call and not just say what you wanted?

His eyes. His blue eyes. His blue imperfect eyes.

and what i want to know is

how do you like your blueeyed boy

Mister Death

I could not that morning remember who wrote those lines. I thought it was E. E. Cummings but I could not be sure. I did not have a volume of Cummings but found an anthology on a poetry shelf in the bedroom, an old textbook of John’s, published in 1949, when he would have been at Portsmouth Priory, the Benedictine boarding school near Newport to which he was sent after his father died.

(His father’s death: sudden, cardiac, in his early fifties, I should have taken that warning.)

If we happened to be anywhere around Newport John would take me to Portsmouth to hear the Gregorian chant at vespers. It was something that moved him. On the flyleaf of the anthology there was written the name
Dunne,
in small careful handwriting, and then, in the same handwriting, blue ink, fountain-pen blue ink, these guides to study:
1) What is the meaning of the poem and what is the experience? 2) What thought or reflection does the experience lead us to? 3) What mood, feeling, emotion is stirred or created by the poem as a whole?
I put the book back on the shelf. It would be some months before I remembered to confirm that the lines were in fact E. E. Cummings. It would also be some months before it occurred to me that my anger at this unknown caller from New York Hospital reflected another version of the primitive dread that had not for me been awakened by the autopsy question.

What was the meaning and what the experience?

To what thought or reflection did the experience lead us?

How could he come back if they took his organs, how could he come back if he had no shoes?

4.

O
n most surface levels I seemed rational. To the average observer I would have appeared to fully understand that death was irreversible. I had authorized the autopsy. I had arranged for cremation. I had arranged for his ashes to be picked up and taken to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where, once Quintana was awake and well enough to be present, they would be placed in the chapel off the main altar where my brother and I had placed our mother’s ashes. I had arranged for the marble plate on which her name was cut to be removed and recut to include John’s name. Finally, on the 23rd of March, almost three months after his death, I had seen the ashes placed in the wall and the marble plate replaced and a service held.

We had Gregorian chant, for John.

Quintana asked that the chant be in Latin. John too would have asked that.

We had a single soaring trumpet.

We had a Catholic priest and an Episcopal priest.

Calvin Trillin spoke, David Halberstam spoke, Quintana’s best friend Susan Traylor spoke. Susanna Moore read a fragment from “East Coker,” the part about how “one has only learnt to get the better of words / For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which / One is no longer disposed to say it.” Nick read Catullus, “On His Brother’s Death.” Quintana, still weak but her voice steady, standing in a black dress in the same cathedral where she had eight months before been married, read a poem she had written to her father.

I had done it. I had acknowledged that he was dead. I had done this in as public a way as I could conceive.

Yet my thinking on this point remained suspiciously fluid. At dinner in the late spring or early summer I happened to meet a prominent academic theologian. Someone at the table raised a question about faith. The theologian spoke of ritual itself being a form of faith. My reaction was unexpressed but negative, vehement, excessive even to me. Later I realized that my immediate thought had been:
But I did the ritual. I did it all.
I did St. John the Divine, I did the chant in Latin, I did the Catholic priest and the Episcopal priest, I did “For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past” and I did “
In paradisum deducant angeli.
”

And it still didn’t bring him back.

“Bringing him back” had been through those months my hidden focus, a magic trick. By late summer I was beginning to see this clearly. “Seeing it clearly” did not yet allow me to give away the clothes he would need.

I
n time of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control. Given that grief remained the most general of afflictions its literature seemed remarkably spare. There was the journal C. S. Lewis kept after the death of his wife,
A Grief Observed.
There was the occasional passage in one or another novel, for example Thomas Mann’s description in
The Magic Mountain
of the effect on Hermann Castorp of his wife’s death: “His spirit was troubled; he shrank within himself; his benumbed brain made him blunder in his business, so that the firm of Castorp and Son suffered sensible financial losses; and the next spring, while inspecting warehouses on the windy landing-stage, he got inflammation of the lungs. The fever was too much for his shaken heart, and in five days, notwithstanding all Dr. Heidekind’s care, he died.” There were, in classical ballets, the moments when one or another abandoned lover tries to find and resurrect one or another loved one, the blued light, the white tutus, the
pas de deux
with the loved one that foreshadows the final return to the dead:
la danse des ombres,
the dance of the shades. There were certain poems, in fact many poems. There was a day or two when I relied on Matthew Arnold, “The Forsaken Merman”:

Children’s voices should be dear

(Call once more) to a mother’s ear;

Children’s voices, wild with pain—

Surely she will come again!

There were days when I relied on W. H. Auden, the “Funeral Blues” lines from
The Ascent of F6:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

The poems and the dances of the shades seemed the most exact to me.

Beyond or below such abstracted representations of the pains and furies of grieving, there was a body of subliterature, how-to guides for dealing with the condition, some “practical,” some “inspirational,” most of either useless. (Don’t drink too much, don’t spend the insurance money redecorating the living room, join a support group.) That left the professional literature, the studies done by the psychiatrists and psychologists and social workers who came after Freud and Melanie Klein, and quite soon it was to this literature that I found myself turning. I learned from it many things I already knew, which at a certain point seemed to promise comfort, validation, an outside opinion that I was not imagining what appeared to be happening. From
Bereavement: Reactions, Consequences, and Care,
compiled in 1984 by the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine, I learned for example that the most frequent immediate responses to death were shock, numbness, and a sense of disbelief: “Subjectively, survivors may feel like they are wrapped in a cocoon or blanket; to others, they may look as though they are holding up well. Because the reality of death has not yet penetrated awareness, survivors can appear to be quite accepting of the loss.”

Here, then, we had the “pretty cool customer” effect.

I read on. Dolphins, I learned from J. William Worden of the Harvard Child Bereavement Study at Massachusetts General Hospital, had been observed refusing to eat after the death of a mate. Geese had been observed reacting to such a death by flying and calling, searching until they themselves became disoriented and lost. Human beings, I read but did not need to learn, showed similar patterns of response. They searched. They stopped eating. They forgot to breathe. They grew faint from lowered oxygen, they clogged their sinuses with unshed tears and ended up in otolaryngologists’ offices with obscure ear infections. They lost concentration. “After a year I could read headlines,” I was told by a friend whose husband had died three years before. They lost cognitive ability on all scales. Like Hermann Castorp they blundered in business and suffered sensible financial losses. They forgot their own telephone numbers and showed up at airports without picture ID. They fell sick, they failed, they even, again like Hermann Castorp, died.

This “dying” aspect had been documented, in study after study.

I began carrying identification when I walked in Central Park in the morning, in case it happened to me.

If the telephone rang when I was in the shower I no longer answered it, to avoid falling dead on the tile.

Certain studies, I learned, were famous. They were icons of the literature, benchmarks, referred to in everything I read. There was for example “Young, Benjamin, and Wallis,
The Lancet
2:454–456, 1963.” This study of 4,486 recent widowers in the United Kingdom, followed for five years, showed “significantly higher death rates for widowers in first six months following bereavement than for married.” There was “Rees and Lutkins,
British Medical Journal
4:13–16, 1967.” This study of 903 bereaved relatives versus 878 non-bereaved matched controls, followed for six years, showed “significantly higher mortality for bereaved spouses in first year.” The functional explanation for such raised mortality rates was laid out in the Institute of Medicine’s 1984 compilation: “Research to date has shown that, like many other stressors, grief frequently leads to changes in the endocrine, immune, autonomic nervous, and cardiovascular systems; all of these are fundamentally influenced by brain function and neurotransmitters.”

There were, I also learned from this literature, two kinds of grief. The preferred kind, the one associated with “growth” and “development,” was “uncomplicated grief,” or “normal bereavement.” Such uncomplicated grief, according to
The Merck Manual,
16th Edition, could still typically present with “anxiety symptoms such as initial insomnia, restlessness, and autonomic nervous system hyperactivity,” but did “not generally cause clinical depression, except in those persons inclined to mood disorder.” The second kind of grief was “complicated grief,” which was also known in the literature as “pathological bereavement” and was said to occur in a variety of situations. One situation in which pathological bereavement could occur, I read repeatedly, was that in which the survivor and the deceased had been unusually dependent on one another. “Was the bereaved actually very dependent upon the deceased person for pleasure, support, or esteem?” This was one of the diagnostic criteria suggested by David Peretz, M.D., of the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University. “Did the bereaved feel helpless without the lost person when enforced separations occurred?”

I considered these questions.

Once in 1968 when I needed unexpectedly to spend the night in San Francisco (I was doing a piece, it was raining, the rain pushed a late-afternoon interview into the next morning), John flew up from Los Angeles so that we could have dinner together. We had dinner at Ernie’s. After dinner John took the PSA “Midnight Flyer,” a thirteen-dollar amenity of an era in California when it was possible to fly from Los Angeles to San Francisco or Sacramento or San Jose for twenty-six dollars round-trip, back to LAX.

I thought about PSA.

All PSA planes had smiles painted on their noses. The flight attendants were dressed in the style of Rudy Gernreich in hot-pink-and-orange miniskirts. PSA represented a time in our life when most things we did seemed without consequence, no-hands, a mood in which no one thought twice about flying seven hundred miles for dinner. This mood ended in 1978, when a PSA Boeing 727 collided with a Cessna 172 over San Diego, killing one hundred and forty-four.

It occurred to me when this happened that I had overlooked the odds when it came to PSA.

I see now that this error was not confined to PSA.

When Quintana at age two or three flew PSA to Sacramento to see my mother and father she referred to it as “going on the smile.” John used to write down the things she said on scraps of paper and put them in a black painted box his mother had given him. This box, which remains with its scraps of paper on a desk in my living room, was painted with an American eagle and the words “E Pluribus Unum.” Later he used some of the things she said in a novel,
Dutch Shea, Jr.
He gave them to Dutch Shea’s daughter, Cat, who had been killed by an IRA bomb while having dinner with her mother in a restaurant on Charlotte Street in London. This is part of what he wrote:

“Where you was?” she would say, and “Where did the morning went?” He wrote them all down and crammed them into the tiny secret drawer in the maple desk Barry Stukin had given him and Lee as a wedding present…. Cat in her school tartan. Cat who could call her bath a “bathment” and the butterflies for a kindergarten experiment “flybutters.” Cat who had made up her first poem at the age of seven: “I’m going to marry / A boy named Harry / He rides horses / And handles divorces.”

The Broken Man was in that drawer. The Broken Man was what Cat called fear and death and the unknown. I had a bad dream about the Broken Man, she would say. Don’t let the Broken Man catch me. If the Broken Man comes, I’ll hang onto the fence and won’t let him take me…. He wondered if the Broken Man had time to frighten Cat before she died.

I see now what I had failed to see in 1982, the year
Dutch Shea, Jr.
was published: this was a novel about grief. The literature would have said that Dutch Shea was undergoing pathological bereavement. The diagnostic signs would have been these: He is obsessed with the moment Cat died. He plays and replays the scene, as if rerunning it could reveal a different ending: the restaurant on Charlotte Street, the endive salad, Cat’s lavender espadrilles, the bomb, Cat’s head in the dessert trolley. He tortures his ex-wife, Cat’s mother, with a single repeated question: why was she in the ladies’ room when the bomb went off? Finally she tells him:

You never gave me much credit for being Cat’s mother, but I did raise her. I took care of her the day she got her period the first time and I remember when she was a little girl she called my bedroom her sweet second room and she called spaghetti buzzghetti and she called people who came to the house hellos. She said where you was and where did the morning went and you told Thayer, you son of a bitch, you wanted someone to remember her. So she told me she was pregnant, it was an accident, and she wanted to know what to do and I went into the ladies’ room because I knew I was going to cry and I didn’t want to cry in front of her and I wanted to get the tears out of the way so I could act sensibly and then I heard the bomb and when I finally got out part of her was in the sherbet and part of her was in the street and you, you son of a bitch, you want someone to remember her.

I believe John would have said that
Dutch Shea, Jr.
was about faith.

When he began the novel he already knew what the last words would be, not only the last words of the novel but the last words thought by Dutch Shea before he shoots himself: “I believe in Cat. I believe in God.”
Credo in Deum.
The first words of the Catholic catechism.

Was it about faith or was it about grief?

Were faith and grief the same thing?

Were we unusually dependent on one another the summer we swam and watched
Tenko
and went to dinner at Morton’s?

Or were we unusually lucky?

If I were alone could he come back to me on the smile?

Would he say get a table at Ernie’s?

PSA and the smile no longer exist, sold to US Airways and then painted off the planes.

Ernie’s no longer exists, but was briefly re-created by Alfred Hitchcock, for
Vertigo.
James Stewart first sees Kim Novak at Ernie’s. Later she falls from the bell tower (also re-created, an effect) at Mission San Juan Bautista.