The weather is nice. Temperate. My phone says it’s 82 degrees, but I’m sitting in the shade on the back deck in ripped jeans and a t-shirt, and it feels just ducky. I’m drinking a Tangerine Express by Stone Brewing. This was a go-to beer for me at John & Peters, a bar in New Hope that I went to on weekends to hear live music. I have music playing in the other room. I can hear it from the deck. “Come along. Stay a touch. We’re with you…. and yoooouuuu’rrrre wiiiitthh ussssss.” Sax solo.
I don’t know what I’m thinking. I don’t mean that in the “I just did a crazy thing” sort of a way, but in the quite literal way. I don’t know what I’m thinking. When I struggle with this, I try to root myself in the setting – backyard, nice weather, beer, music, memories of a bar I used to know. It’s Sunday, so I have the Sunday feels. I’d call them the Sunday blues – which would be a reasonable approximation of the heaviness – but the music and the weather don’t feel oppressive (it’s not one of my sombre playlists).
Yesterday I went to my very first pride parade. Seeing so many people celebrate who they are was joyous and surprisingly emotional. I felt guilty about being understated in my support. I wore a small sticker that I was given and held a small pride flag that I was given. I’m overly cautious about being front and center in someone else’s moment. I felt the same way when I marched as part of the BLM movement in Memphis. I’m not black. I’m not gay. I probably don’t belong here. How can I help? I’m there to bear witness. I’m there to let people who wish to be seen know that they are seen. I don’t know what it is about these things that make me well up and get misty-eyed, but I do. I felt especially emotional when the two or three different church groups marched by with their banners of acceptance: love is love, we’re all equal in the eyes of the lord… I’m not a religious person – mostly because I find it to be dogmatic and intolerant. I like, and need, to be reminded that there are a lot of loving and caring people of faith out there.
This morning I finished reading Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. I struggle to stay with longer form writing long enough to finish a novel or a memoir, so I considered this a small victory for my attention span. It was a good read. I wish I had read it sooner. It’s an account of her life and emotional state in the year after her husband passed away. They had been married for close to, or over, 40 years (sorry, some of the details escape me). The only thing I found distracting was some of the “name dropping” in describing the life they lived. Houses in Malibu, trips to Paris and Hawaii, frequent dinners at Morton’s, staying at the Ritz on a regular basis, this diplomat, that movie producer. Letting it distract me is more of a me issue. She states these things very matter-of-factly, because those were the facts of the life she and her husband lived. Two very successful writers with lots of connections.
I admired the structure of the book – the disjointed nature that represents a year in and out of grief and mourning. She is adept at describing her often mudgy thinking and the disorientation she felt on so many occasions. Disorientation because someone is there and then they’re not. She also does a good job of acknowledging how the mind grasps at trying to recreate and remember the past… She kept time by the prior year’s calendar – meaning she could remember what she and her husband had done on specific days from the prior year. Many dates became a “that was the last time we…” She writes about the objects we hold on to – the stack of her husband’s books she left undisturbed because it was what he was reading in the days before his death. Disturbing them would be a betrayal of sorts. She shares how odd it was the first time she completed a form where she checked the marital status box for widow. It’s not something you prepare yourself for or imagine yourself doing.
If I say I wish I had read this book sooner, it’s because I was engaged to widow. As I read, I kept thinking, “I had no idea” and “I’m so sorry.” Nobody does. As Didion writes, “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.” As I read, I had so many questions and at the same time felt like I had gained a sense of wisdom far too late. When I was with my ex, I had incorrectly assumed that the grieving and mourning process was over… often taking for granted her pleasant disposition – taking it as a sign that she had worked through all of “that stuff.” I even had a friend who seemed to suggest that prolonged grieving was abnormal. No longer a friend.
Some of the signs that she was still grieving were there. My ex would talk about her own mudgy thinking – saying she had a “fish brain.” Quite often, she seemed caught between wanting to honor her late husband and wanting to distance herself from that part of her life. She didn’t talk about him very much and when she did, it wasn’t always in the kindest of terms. On some level, I always suspected there was more to it. I always suspected that being critical of their marriage somehow made his passing easier to deal with. When we talked about these things it was more in the context of her psychological well-being and healing. I would read articles on complex PTSD hoping I might better understand where she was coming from. Nothing I read then matched the depth of Didion’s book or her efforts to understand her own grief. As she read an article on happiness, Didion writes:
…”research has shown that people can adapt to a wide range of good or bad life events in less than two months,” there remained “some events to which people are slow or unable to adapt completely.” Unemployment was one such event. “We also find,” the authors added, “that it takes the average widow many years after her spouse’s death to regain her former level of life satisfaction.”
Was I “the average widow”? What in fact would have been my “former level of life satisfaction”?
Was my ex the average widow? How long is many years? We met about three years after her husband passed. Were we both expecting an unrealistic return to “her former level of satisfaction”?
When I finished the book, I looked at the copyright. 2005. The book would have been around when my ex’s husband passed. I wondered if she had read it. I could see how it might have been both comforting and triggering, familiar and foreign. Each grief is unique – each love is unique. Somehow, Didion manages to feel like a companion on the journey. At times, it was easy to think that my ex might have read this book – it’s one that’s frequently gifted to people in grief. Far more often than I expected, I found myself drawing parallels between the two women. Or maybe I was just reading too much into it. As Didion writes, “survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed… they live by symbols. They read meaning into the barrage of spam on the unused computer.” Among the parallels I was drawing were their affinity for Hawaii; the east coast, west coast, California thing; the writer thing; the desire to live life with a writerly type… Even some of the pictures of a young Didion have a slight resemblance to my ex. And of course, the grief. There’s a tenderness in Didion’s language that reminded me of our better, more tender moments. As I read, it was hard not to draw the comparisons. Even though I hadn’t read the book back then, I used to believe that given enough time, my ex and I would have worked towards a less successful, less glitzy version of how Didion describes her marriage. And that was also part of what made the book appeal to me… in some respects, I could see myself in it.
It’s dark now. It’s several hours after I started this on the back deck with my beer. I switched the playlist to something a little slower and more wistful and then turned the music off entirely. Some of the heaviness that was hitting me earlier dissipated as the sun ducked behind the clouds and evening settled in. Joan Didion and her husband, John Dunne, shared a long life together. As writers, they both worked from home and spent an inordinate amount of time in each other’s company. They seemed to genuinely enjoy that. They traveled together and frequently shared with each other whatever it was they were reading or working on. And I think that was some of the heaviness that I was feeling. Yesterday I spent time watching people celebrate who they are and how they love. Today I finished reading a thought-provoking and sensitive examination of how we deal with absence. The heaviness was in knowing that I’d sit on the deck in the sunshine and want to talk about these things, want to compare notes, want to hear a voice other than my own – listen to someone else’s magical thinking.