The Year of Magical Thinking: The Play

by Joan Didion

An obituary means he is dead. I am seized by the need not to let anyone at the Los Angeles Times read this in The New York Times. I call a friend at the Los Angeles Times. As he picks up I realize that I have made a mistake. It's still early in Los Angeles, is John even dead there? What time was it here when they said he was dead? Is it that time yet in Los Angeles? If there's time left on the West Coast, does it even need to happen there? Should I be taking him there right now? If I hang up and fly out can we have a different ending on Pacific time?

That was the beginning of my year of magical thinking. When I wake and he still isn't here I try not to move.

The obituaries were already on the wires. We told the resident on duty in the ICU that the television in her room had to be turned off. The resident said that television news could be helpful in maintaining mentation in unconscious patients. We said her father had died. It was a news story. She could not be allowed to learn from CNN that her father was dead. The television set was turned off. When we came back that evening the set was back on. We said it again. The next day when I walked into the ICU there was a sign taped up. “DEAD FATHER. NO TV.”

I began. I filled many bags with T-shirts, sweatpants, socks, Brooks Brothers shorts. A few weeks later I assembled more empty bags. I was not yet prepared to address suits or shirts or jackets but thought I could handle the shoes. I stopped at the door to the room. I could not give away his shoes. I stood there a moment, then realized why: he would need shoes if he was to return.

In the course of doing research I had watched autopsies. I knew exactly what happens, the face peeled down, the chest open like a chicken in a butcher's case. I still wanted the autopsy. In fact I wanted to be in the room when they did it, but I didn't think I could present this point rationally so I didn't ask. Here was my reasoning, which for some months remained hidden even from me: an autopsy could show that what had gone wrong was no more than a transitory blockage or arrhythmia. If so, the reasoning went, they might be able to fix it.

“How's Dad,” she whispered when I saw her that evening. I told her again. “But how is he now.” She had absorbed the event but not the outcome. That was the flaw in the story I was telling. I could never make the outcome convincing. In the end I would have to tell her again, in another intensive care unit, this one at UCLA.

They had gotten off the plane. They had picked up their shared bag. Gerry was carrying the bag to the car rental shuttle, crossing the arrivals driveway ahead of her. He looked back. She was lying on her back on the asphalt.

July 26, 2003. All gone. Over. In another world. I cannot think of what is gone. If I think of what is gone the difference between then and now will take me.

“I warned you,” John says. “I told you what working for Life would be like. Didn't I tell you? It would be like being nibbled to death by ducks?”

They cut off half her hair in the OR and the rest got cut in the ICU but it is already growing back, baby hair, feathers, like a duck.

You think I'm crazy because otherwise I'm dangerous. Radioactive. If I'm sane, what happened to me could happen to you.

I put something else in Quintana's bag this morning. The copy of Clinical Neuroanatomy I bought at the UCLA Medical Center bookstore when I could not understand what the doctors were saying. This book has been by my bed at the Beverly Wilshire for five weeks and I still do not understand what the doctors are saying.

In the passage about the tornado there was what could have been a typo, a dropped word. I considered adding the word but did not. If I added a word he did not want he might not come back.

What exactly was wrong with thinking he could come back? Wasn't it getting us through this? What can get us through this now?

Don't let the Broken Man catch me, she would say when she was three or four and woke from bad dreams. If the Broken Man comes I'll hang on to the fence and not let him take me.

I watched the river as it happened. Have you ever wondered why the ICUs in New York hospitals have such high-rent river views? Why you can watch the tide turn in the East River from the ICUs at Cornell? Why you can watch the sea surge press back the Hudson from the ICUs at Columbia?

I have a few more questions I need to ask her. Did I lie to you? Did I lie to you all your life? When I said you're safe, I'm here, was that a lie or did you believe it? Is a lie only a story that the hearer disbelieves? Is that the only definition of a lie? Or did you believe it?

I did not want the year after either of them died to end. I knew that as the second year began and the days passed, certain things would happen. My image of them at the instant of death would become something that happened in another year. My sense of John and Quintana themselves, John and Quintana alive, would become more remote, softened, transmuted into whatever best served my life without them. In fact this is already happening.

I think about swimming with him into that cave, about the swell of clear water, the way it changed, the swiftness and power it gained as it narrowed through the rocks at the base of the point. The tide had to be just right. We had to be in the water at the very moment the tide was right. We could only have done this a half dozen times at most during the two years we lived there but it is what I remember. Each time we did it I was afraid of missing the swell, hanging back, timing it wrong. He never was. You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that.