'Life changes in the instant'

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion; Alfred A. Knopf; 2005; 227 pages; $23.95 (hardcover)

This book gives us glimpses into a 40-year marriage--with all the good and the bad parts--and the life the couple shared with their adopted daughter. For much of the book, the author is with her daughter in the hospital, trying to keep her "safe," constantly hoping she will recover. But forces beyond her control are at work. Didion said that writing was her attempt to make sense of the "weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself."

As the writer tries to come to terms with her husband's death, there is a sense of wanting to turn back the clock. She constantly reflects on the details of what happened the night Dunne died--they came home from the hospital, she built a fire, fixed him a drink and started making dinner--as if to reach a point where his death could be avoided. And with the passage of time, Didion finds she cannot escape her pain--whenever she goes someplace she'd been with John or Quintana, she is haunted by memories, unable to enjoy the present.

The closeness Didion and Dunne shared is apparent in the minute details. Except for a brief period when they were first married, the couple worked together in their New York City apartment every day. Each morning, they'd wake up and go for a walk in Central Park: They followed different routes, but made sure their paths intercepted at a certain point so they could have breakfast together, usually outside. Then they'd go home and start writing in their separate offices, consulting each other as necessary and reading each other's drafts. They'd break for lunch, and then work through the afternoon. In the evening, they'd usually go out to eat. Didion said they never seemed to get tired of each other's company.

Apart from its sheer cathartic nature, this book is for anyone who has dealt with the death of a loved one, especially a spouse. Didion says that people who'd recently lost someone have a look of "extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness," which she noticed in her own face. She says: "Grief when it comes is nothing we expect it to be." The writer adds that when her parents died, she didn't really feel the same--what she felt then was "a sadness, loneliness . . . regret for time gone by, for things unsaid. , , . But this time grief was different for her. "Grief has no distance . . . comes in waves and paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knee and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life." Didion talks about trying to go through daily rituals--waking up in bed and wondering why she was alone, and then remembering: "I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day."

Didion says she did not want to finish writing this book, because then it would mean finishing the year and finding some resolution. She talks about how her image of John "at the instant of his death will become less immediate, less raw . . . more remote. . . ." What she concludes is what most people have experienced: "I know why we try to keep the dead alive; we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us . . . If we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead."

Farah Ameen is a freelance magazine editor in New York City.