Years of Magical Thinking

Photo by Petri Haanpää on Unsplash

I’m borrowing Joan Didion’s book title and dropping the singular ‘The’. For Didion, her ‘magical year’ was the metaphor she used for the grief that descended on her following her husband’s death. I almost bought it when it was published in 2005. The NY Times review by the poet, Robert Pinsky was glowing. Didion’s book sounded right up my alley at that time–might have learned something—but I’m only now getting the courage to read it.

Didion’s book concerns her husband’s sudden massive heart attack leaving her stunned. Piled on top of worry about their adult daughter lying in a coma in an ICU. One hour she and her husband are visiting their child in the hospital, leaning on each other for support, witnessing their daughter’s dance with death, and in the next he’s slumped in a dining room chair and she’s on her own.

Returning from the hospital after rushing to the ER, she begins her magical thinking:

“When I walked into the apartment and saw John’s jacket and scarf still lying on the chair where he had dropped them when we came in from seeing Quintana at Beth Israel North (the red cashmere scarf, the Patagonia windbreaker that had been the crew jacket on Up Close and Personal) I wondered what an uncool customer would be allowed to do.  Break down?  Require sedation?  Scream?”

from The Year of Magical Thinking

Didion tells of the immediate circumstances with clinical dispatch. Her grieving pose–as a public person perhaps–is to stand in place, contained and composed. I had the impression from the early part of the book that’s where she would remain–until she reaches for a quote from the professionals discussing grief:

I read an explanation by Vamik V. Volkan, MD… at the University of Virginia… at what he calls re-grief therapy… for the treatment of ‘established pathological mourners’…

‘we help the patient to review the circumstances of the death–how it occurred, the patient’s reaction to the news, and to viewing the body, the events of the funeral, etc.  Anger usually appears at this point if the therapy is going well… Abreaction [1] may then take place and demonstrate to the patient the actuality of his repressed impulses.  Using our understanding of the psychodynamics involved in the patient’s need to keep the lost one alive, we can then explain and interpret the relationship that had existed between the patient and the one who died.’  

“But from where did Dr. Volkan and his crew in Charlottesville derive their unique understanding of ‘the psychodynamics involved in the patient’s need to keep the lost one alive’ their special ability to ‘explain and interpret the relationship that had existed between the patient and the one who died’? Were you watching Tenko with me and ‘the lost one’ in Brentwood Park, did you go to dinner with us at Morton’s? Were you with me and ‘the one who had died’ at Punchbowl in Hawaii four months before it happened? Did you gather up plumeria blossoms with us and drop them on the graves of the unknown dead from Pearl Harbor? Did you catch cold with us in the rain at the Jardin du Ranelagh in Paris a month before it happened? Did you skip the Monets with us and go to lunch at Conti?”

from The Year of Magical Thinking

Didion begins to lose her careful grip, the rage leaking from each sentence like blood wrung from a hand towel after the damage. By the end of her excoriation, I’d found the book’s hook, registering absolute agreement with her sentiment.

There’s a line from one of my poems, Ryan’s funeral was years too short.

The point I’m working toward is there isn’t just a single year of magical thinking. After Ryan’s suicide it stretched out nearly a decade. In the middle of it, one day D caught me off guard saying, “you’re not happy.” That was an understatement and her way of saying I’d checked out on her as well. I hadn’t meant it to be that, though I was conscious I was only going through the motions. All I had in those first few years after his death were the poems, so it felt.

Not that they were better than what they were–only that they were the best I could do. Otherwise I was numb and working toward becoming better numbed. I doubt I’ll ever again write as many lines or wrestle with them as intensely, and hope I never do. The price of losing him was bad enough without dying a second time.

Didion’s back-cover photo is dated 1978, decades before her book’s publication in 2005. Shot on a deck overlooking the Pacific in Malibu, just the book’s three central characters, Didion, her husband, John Dunne and their child, Quintana Roo Dunne. He’s studying the camera intently, drink in hand and poising close to their daughter. Quintana, the child, seems nervous of the camera, like she wasn’t sure she should trust it, while her mother, elbows carefully resting on the railing is observing them from a separate part of the deck, close but not of them, her own drink on the railing beside her and a cigarette gracefully in hand as she studies her family. Ironic photo selection? Perhaps bitterly so. More, the capture of a moment before their lives were broken–that’s what the photograph stands for.

What I’d read in the days after Ryan’s suicide, written by psychiatrists and the like about the house of grief paralleled Didion’s experience. Time to buck up. You’ll get through this. Chop, chop.

One article seemed to think six months would serve as the proper time to grieve. Like topping off the oil in a car engine? Possibly the journalist’s writing, but it came across as a social rule not to let things get too out of hand.

The commentators Didion was researching proclaimed one can become ‘excessive’ about grief. Yeah? Really? It’s not fucking NORMAL!

‘Rage, rage against the night’ is an overused quote by Dylan Thomas, so I’ll use it again here.

OK, it’s not normal to write like a madman, cursing and drinking until you’re stumbling drunk still thinking you could use another. It took time, but it finally came to me the alcohol would destroy me more assuredly than the grief. Living like Miss Havisham spending dwindling days in a rotten wedding dress isn’t the most healthy of mental places, but all I can say is that grief demands what time it demands and the rest is bullshit. Or buffalo chips, as Colonel Potter liked to say.

When my mother was dying, what hurt more than anything was realizing she’d slipped away years before the Parkinson’s finally claimed her body. The dementia destroyed her keen mind–her true jewel–my lodestar. Her actual death was a blessing, though we never said good bye.


I’m only through a third of The Year of Magical Thinking. Even eighteen years after Ryan’s death, this won’t be an easy book to read–or to review–but I feel the need to make observations about it from one who was there before Didion. Like Billy Collins says, the subject of poetry is death. He’s a man whose poems are as dry as Didion’s book and as wrenching if you let the lines sink in. Literary critics opining about Collins being a lightweight–or Didion being too cerebral–haven’t gone through the brutal process of letting go. Sad to say the odds aren’t any in our favor.

I read Boys at Bed at Ryan’s funeral–a poem I’d written when he was five and his brother ten. In the days before his funeral, I tried to write a eulogy, but tore it up. There was too much needed saying with no means of saying it. It finally came to me–there wasn’t a better way to memorialize him–and speak to his brother, his mother, our friends and relatives who were in the church. Even if the poem’s final line was shadowed that day, it still means something. It was first published privately in 1991 in Shadows, a first book of poems.

Boys at Bed

They set aside
their conscious minds so fast
they surely must wear masks,
with clothes dumped in a pile
they drop their days into the night.
Coming into dreams like birds
flying with dark horses
returned from where they came,
amazing wraiths.

All day they spin at speed
and yell
of tests to try themselves,
rushing from one pose
toward two,
this work they claim as theirs.

Grudgingly they yield
to bath to books to bed,
pretending unfamiliarity
with its ward,
arguing for minutes
they leave no room for sleep
then slyly with a wink
they skip
from here to there
and gone!

August 1990 – Graves Mountain Lodge

[1] Abreaction: “The liberation by revival and expression of the emotion associated with forgotten or repressed ideas of the event that first caused it.” from the Oxford English Dictionary.