L'année de la pensée magique

Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. It was an ordinary evening, the last Tuesday in December. Our daughter, Quintana, was unconscious in an intensive care unit, struck down by a flu that had exploded into pneumonia and septic shock, but even that had become, in five days, a routine of horror. We had just come home from seeing her. I built a fire, as we always did. I made John a Scotch. He was reading, I was mixing the salad. He was talking, and then he wasn't. I looked up to see him slumped in his chair, his hand raised as if in a frozen gesture. When he fell, the paramedics came, transforming our living room into an emergency department, a blur of syringes and defibrillating paddles. At the hospital, a social worker met me at the door. “I'm your social worker,” he said, and that is when I must have known. He called me a “pretty cool customer.”

Inside the apartment, alone again, the silence was absolute. There was his jacket on a chair, the book he'd been reading, the blood on the floor that I could not yet face. I did the things that needed to be done. I called his brother. I called my brother. I put his wallet and his watch away. But a deeper, more primitive part of my mind refused to accept the fact. I insisted on spending that first night alone, because I needed to be there so that he could come back. This was the beginning of my year of magical thinking. It was a form of insanity, a derangement hidden from everyone, even, for a time, from myself. I could not give away his shoes, because he would need shoes if he was to return. I could not read the obituaries, because to read them would be to admit that I had allowed him to be buried alive.

Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be. It is not a clean sadness but a pathogenic state, a sickness. It comes in waves, paroxysms that weaken the knees and blind the eyes. In an attempt to gain control, I turned to the literature, to Freud and medical studies and psychiatric journals, seeking a diagnosis for my condition. I learned that grief leads to measurable changes in the endocrine, immune, and cardiovascular systems. I learned that the bereaved have a significantly higher mortality rate in the first year. I learned that what I was experiencing - the derangement, the magical thinking - was a recognized response, a state in which the mind, to protect itself, refuses to accept the finality of the event. To accept the event would be to accept that I was helpless, that I had not been able to save him.

The past became a vortex, a dangerous place where any memory could pull me under. The Dorothy Draper wallpaper border in a hospital waiting room would trigger a memory of a novel I wrote when Quintana was three, which would lead to a memory of her running through a sprinkler, which would lead to a professional slight, which would lead to a fight with John, a spiral of associations that always ended in the same raw place. We had been married for forty years, working in the same house, our voices a constant sound in each other's days. We were not two people, but one. The memories were not just memories; they were the substance of my life, now fractured. I remembered a summer in Malibu, watching the BBC series *Tenko* after swimming in the pool, a time he mentioned often in the year before he died. "I tell you that I shall not live two days," the knight Gawain had said, knowing his own end. I began to see the omens I had missed, the shadows I had dismissed as depression.

Just as I believed we had navigated the worst, just as Quintana was recovering and we had held a service for John at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, life changed again. It was late March. Quintana and her husband flew to Los Angeles to rest, to walk on the beach. I imagined her there, in the Malibu sun. That evening, the phone rang. She had collapsed at the airport. She was in emergency neurosurgery at UCLA, a massive hematoma in her brain. One pupil was fixed, and the other went as they wheeled her in. The vortex opened again, this time pulling me into the alien vocabulary of neurosurgery, of midline shifts and fixed and dilated pupils. For five weeks I lived at the Beverly Wilshire, driving the same route to the hospital each day, avoiding every street and restaurant that held a memory, trying to manage a situation that was utterly beyond management.

In the ICU at UCLA, I whispered to my unconscious daughter, “You're safe. I'm here.” It was the basic promise I had made to her since birth, and the one I now knew I could not always keep. She was no longer a child. I could not prevent the world from happening to her. I could not prevent the fact that I would one day die and leave her. The magical thinking began to fray. I saw that I had been trying to reverse time, to run the film backward, to find an alternate reel where the collision did not happen, where the star did not collapse. But the collapse had been there all along, a greater than 95 percent stenosis of the left anterior descending artery. The widowmaker.

The first year is ending now. The craziness is receding, but no clarity is taking its place. I am left with the unending absence, the relentless succession of moments when an impulse arises - to tell him something, to ask him something - and finds no target. This is the void, the very opposite of meaning. I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves, there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Knowing this does not make it any easier.

I remember swimming with him into a sea cave at Portuguese Bend, where we lived when we were first married. The tide had to be just right, the swell of clear water gaining swiftness and power as it narrowed through the rocks. Each time, I was afraid of missing the moment, of timing it wrong. John 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.