Читать книгу The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion - Страница 11

4.

On 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.

In 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 sub-literature, 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.

We were married at San Juan Bautista.

On a January afternoon when the blossoms were showing in the orchards off 101.

When there were still orchards off 101.

No. The way you got sideswiped was by going back. The blossoms showing in the orchards off 101 was the incorrect track.

For several weeks after it happened I tried to keep myself on the correct track (the narrow track, the track on which there was no going back) by repeating to myself the last two lines of “Rose Aylmer,” Walter Savage Landor’s 1806 elegy to the memory of a daughter of Lord Aylmer’s who had died at age twenty in Calcutta. I had not thought of “Rose Aylmer” since I was an undergraduate at Berkeley, but now I could remember not only the poem but much of what had been said about it in whichever class I had heard it analyzed. “Rose Aylmer” worked, whoever was teaching this class had said, because the overblown and therefore meaningless praise for the deceased in the first four lines (“Ah, what avails the sceptred race! / Ah, what the form divine! / What every virtue, every grace! / Rose Aylmer, all were thine”) gets brought into sudden, even shocking relief by “the hard sweet wisdom” of the last two lines, which suggest that mourning has its place but also its limits: “A night of memories and sighs / I consecrate to thee.”

“‘A night of memories and sighs,’ ” I remembered the lecturer repeating. “A night. One night. It might be all night but he doesn’t even say all night, he says a night, not a matter of a lifetime, a matter of some hours.”