Chapter One
1.
Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
The question of self-pity.
Those were the first words I wrote after it happened. The computer
dating on the Microsoft Word file ("Notes on change.doc") reads "May
20, 2004, 11:11 p.m.," but that would have been a case of my opening
the file and reflexively pressing save when I closed it. I had made
no changes to that file in May. I had made no changes to that file
since I wrote the words, in January 2004, a day or two or three
after the fact.
For a long time I wrote nothing else.
Life changes in the instant.
The ordinary instant.
At some point, in the interest of remembering what seemed most
striking about what had happened, I considered adding those words,
"the ordinary instant." I saw immediately that there would be no
need to add the word "ordinary," because there would be no
forgetting it: the word never left my mind. It was in fact the
ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me
from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating
it, getting past it. I recognize now that there was nothing unusual
in this: confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how
unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable
occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine
errand that ended on the shoulder with the car in flames, the swings
where the children were playing as usual when the rattlesnake struck
from the ivy. "He was on his way home from work-happy, successful,
healthy-and then, gone," I read in the account of a psychiatric
nurse whose husband was killed in a highway accident. In 1966 I
happened to interview many people who had been living in Honolulu on
the morning of December 7, 1941; without exception, these people
began their accounts of Pearl Harbor by telling me what an "ordinary
Sunday morning" it had been. "It was just an ordinary beautiful
September day," people still say when asked to describe the morning
in New York when American Airlines 11 and United Airlines 175 got
flown into the World Trade towers. Even the report of the 9/11
Commission opened on this insistently premonitory and yet still
dumbstruck narrative note: "Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned
temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States."
"And then-gone." In the midst of life we are in death, Episcopalians
say at the graveside. Later I realized that I must have repeated the
details of what happened to everyone who came to the house in those
first weeks, all those friends and relatives who brought food and
made drinks and laid out plates on the dining room table for however
many people were around at lunch or dinner time, all those who
picked up the plates and froze the leftovers and ran the dishwasher
and filled our (I could not yet think my) otherwise empty house even
after I had gone into the bedroom (our bedroom, the one in which
there still lay on a sofa a faded terrycloth XL robe bought in the
1970s at Richard Carroll in Beverly Hills) and shut the door. Those
moments when I was abruptly overtaken by exhaustion are what I
remember most clearly about the first days and weeks. I have no
memory of telling anyone the details, but I must have done so,
because everyone seemed to know them. At one point I considered the
possibility that they had picked up the details of the story from
one another, but immediately rejected it: the story they had was in
each instance too accurate to have been passed from hand to hand. It
had come from me.
Another reason I knew that the story had come from me was that no
version I heard included the details I could not yet face, for
example the blood on the living room floor that stayed there until
José came in the next morning and cleaned it up.
José. Who was part of our household. Who was supposed to be flying
to Las Vegas later that day, December 31, but never went. José was
crying that morning as he cleaned up the blood. When I first told
him what had happened he had not understood. Clearly I was not the
ideal teller of this story, something about my version had been at
once too offhand and too elliptical, something in my tone had failed
to convey the central fact in the situation (I would encounter the
same failure later when I had to tell Quintana), but by the time
José saw the blood he understood.
I had picked up the abandoned syringes and ECG electrodes before he
came in that morning but I could not face the blood.
In outline.
It is now, as I begin to write this, the afternoon of October 4,
2004.
Nine months and five days ago, at approximately nine o'clock on the
evening of December 30, 2003, my husband, John Gregory Dunne,
appeared to (or did) experience, at the table where he and I had
just sat down to dinner in the living room of our apartment in New
York, a sudden massive coronary event that caused his death. Our
only child, Quintana, had been for the previous five nights
unconscious in an intensive care unit at Beth Israel Medical
Center's Singer Division, at that time a hospital on East End Avenue
(it closed in August 2004) more commonly known as "Beth Israel
North" or "the old Doctors' Hospital," where what had seemed a case
of December flu sufficiently severe to take her to an emergency room
on Christmas morning had exploded into pneumonia and septic shock.
This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks
and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about
death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune
and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about
the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life
ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself. I have
been a writer my entire life. As a writer, even as a child, long
before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that
meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences
and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I
thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. The
way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is a case in which
I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room,
equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could
touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you
simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you
pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant
readings of the same lines. This is a case in which I need more than
words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever
it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself.
2.
December 30, 2003, a Tuesday.
We had seen Quintana in the sixth-floor ICU at Beth Israel North.
We had come home.
We had discussed whether to go out for dinner or eat in.
I said I would build a fire, we could eat in.
I built the fire, I started dinner, I asked John if he wanted a
drink.
I got him a Scotch and gave it to him in the living room, where he
was reading in the chair by the fire where he habitually sat.
The book he was reading was by David Fromkin, a bound galley of
Europe's Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914?
I finished getting dinner, I set the table in the living room where,
when we were home alone, we could eat within sight of the fire. I
find myself stressing the fire because fires were important to us. I
grew up in California, John and I lived there together for
twenty-four years, in California we heated our houses by building
fires. We built fires even on summer evenings, because the fog came
in. Fires said we were home, we had drawn the circle, we were safe
through the night. I lit the candles. John asked for a second drink
before sitting down. I gave it to him. We sat down. My attention was
on mixing the salad.
John was talking, then he wasn't.
At one point in the seconds or minute before he stopped talking he
had asked me if I had used single-malt Scotch for his second drink.
I had said no, I used the same Scotch I had used for his first
drink. "Good," he had said. "I don't know why but I don't think you
should mix them." At another point in those seconds or that minute
he had been talking about why World War One was the critical event
from which the entire rest of the twentieth century flowed.
I have no idea which subject we were on, the Scotch or World War
One, at the instant he stopped talking.
I only remember looking up. His left hand was raised and he was
slumped motionless. At first I thought he was making a failed joke,
an attempt to make the difficulty of the day seem manageable.
I remember saying Don't do that.
When he did not respond my first thought was that he had started to
eat and choked. I remember trying to lift him far enough from the
back of the chair to give him the Heimlich. I remember the sense of
his weight as he fell forward, first against the table, then to the
floor. In the kitchen by the telephone I had taped a card with the
New York-Presbyterian ambulance numbers. I had not taped the numbers
by the telephone because I anticipated a moment like this. I had
taped the numbers by the telephone in case someone in the building
needed an ambulance.
Someone else.
I called one of the numbers. A dispatcher asked if he was breathing.
I said Just come. When the paramedics came I tried to tell them what
had happened but before I could finish they had transformed the part
of the living room where John lay into an emergency department. One
of them (there were three, maybe four, even an hour later I could
not have said) was talking to the hospital about the
electrocardiogram they seemed already to be transmitting. Another
was opening the first or second of what would be many syringes for
injection. (Epinephrine? Lidocaine? Procainamide? The names came to
mind but I had no idea from where.) I remember saying that he might
have choked. This was dismissed with a finger swipe: the airway was
clear. They seemed now to be using defibrillating paddles, an
attempt to restore a rhythm. They got something that could have been
a normal heartbeat (or I thought they did, we had all been silent,
there was a sharp jump), then lost it, and started again.
"He's still fibbing," I remember the one on the telephone saying.
"V-fibbing," John's cardiologist said the next morning when he
called from Nantucket. "They would have said 'V-fibbing.' V for
ventricular."
Maybe they said "V-fibbing" and maybe they did not. Atrial
fibrillation did not immediately or necessarily cause cardiac
arrest. Ventricular did. Maybe ventricular was the given.
I remember trying to straighten out in my mind what would happen
next. Since there was an ambulance crew in the living room, the next
logical step would be going to the hospital. It occurred to me that
the crew could decide very suddenly to go to the hospital and I
would not be ready. I would not have in hand what I needed to take.
I would waste time, get left behind. I found my handbag and a set of
keys and a summary John's doctor had made of his medical history.
When I got back to the living room the paramedics were watching the
computer monitor they had set up on the floor. I could not see the
monitor so I watched their faces. I remember one glancing at the
others. When the decision was made to move it happened very fast. I
followed them to the elevator and asked if I could go with them.
They said they were taking the gurney down first, I could go in the
second ambulance. One of them waited with me for the elevator to
come back up. By the time he and I got into the second ambulance the
ambulance carrying the gurney was pulling away from the front of the
building. The distance from our building to the part of New
York-Presbyterian that used to be New York Hospital is six crosstown
blocks. I have no memory of sirens. I have no memory of traffic.
When we arrived at the emergency entrance to the hospital the gurney
was already disappearing into the building. A man was waiting in the
driveway. Everyone else in sight was wearing scrubs. He was not. "Is
this the wife," he said to the driver, then turned to me. "I'm your
social worker," he said, and I guess that is when I must have known.
I opened the door and I seen the man in the dress greens and I knew.
I immediately knew." This was what the mother of a nineteen-year-old
killed by a bomb in Kirkuk said on an HBO documentary quoted by Bob
Herbert in The New York Times on the morning of November 12, 2004.
"But I thought that if, as long as I didn't let him in, he couldn't
tell me. And then it-none of that would've happened. So he kept
saying, 'Ma'am, I need to come in.' And I kept telling him, 'I'm
sorry, but you can't come in.' "
When I read this at breakfast almost eleven months after the night
with the ambulance and the social worker I recognized the thinking
as my own.
Inside the emergency room I could see the gurney being pushed into a
cubicle, propelled by more people in scrubs. Someone told me to wait
in the reception area. I did. There was a line for admittance
paperwork. Waiting in the line seemed the constructive thing to do.
Waiting in the line said that there was still time to deal with
this, I had copies of the insurance cards in my handbag, this was
not a hospital I had ever negotiated-New York Hospital was the
Cornell part of New York-Presbyterian, the part I knew was the
Columbia part, Columbia-Presbyterian, at 168th and Broadway, twenty
minutes away at best, too far in this kind of emergency-but I could
make this unfamiliar hospital work, I could be useful, I could
arrange the transfer to Columbia-Presbyterian once he was
stabilized. I was fixed on the details of this imminent transfer to
Columbia (he would need a bed with telemetry, eventually I could
also get Quintana transferred to Columbia, the night she was
admitted to Beth Israel North I had written on a card the beeper
numbers of several Columbia doctors, one or another of them could
make all this happen) when the social worker reappeared and guided
me from the paperwork line into an empty room off the reception
area. "You can wait here," he said. I waited. The room was cold, or
I was. I wondered how much time had passed between the time I called
the ambulance and the arrival of the paramedics. It had seemed no
time at all (a mote in the eye of God was the phrase that came to me
in the room off the reception area) but it must have been at the
minimum several minutes.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Year of Magical Thinking
by Joan Didion
Copyright © 2005 by Joan Didion.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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The Year of Magical Thinking