the year of magical thinking - joan didion

[...]... his eyes Eight months later I asked the manager of our apartment building if he still had the log kept by the doormen for the night of December 30 I knew there was a log, I had been for three years president of the board of the building, the door log was intrinsic to building procedure The next day the manager sent me the page for December 30 According to the log the doormen that night were Michael... 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... 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. .. 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... 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... the family.” I read an explanation, by Vamik D V olkan, M.D., a professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, of what he called “re-grief therapy,” a technique developed at the University of Virginia for the treatment of “established pathological mourners.” In such therapy, according to Dr Volkan, a point occurs at which: we help the patient to review the circumstances of. .. circumstances of the death—how it occurred, the patient’s reaction to the news and to viewing the body, the events of the funeral, etc Anger usually appears at this point if the therapy is going well; it is at first diffused, then directed toward others, and finally directed toward the dead Abreactions—what Bibring [E Bibring, 1954, “Psychoanalysis and the Dynamic Psychotherapies,” Journal of the American... the house You go to the funeral If the family is Catholic you also go to the rosary but you do not wail or keen or in any other way demand the attention of the family In the end Emily Post’s 1922 etiquette book turned out to be as acute in its apprehension of this other way of death, and as prescriptive in its treatment of grief, as anything else I read I will not forget the instinctive wisdom of the. .. take me to Portsmouth to hear the Gregorian chant at vespers It was something that moved him On the flyleaf of the anthology there was written the name Dunne, in small careful handwriting, and then, in the same handwriting, blue ink, fountain-pen blue ink, these guides to study: 1) What is the meaning of the poem and what is the experience? 2) What thought or reflection does the experience lead us to?... that would be the way I woke to the day I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day One of several lines from different poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins that John strung together during the months immediately after his younger brother committed suicide, a kind of improvised rosary O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed Hold them cheap May who ne’er hung there I wake . 21 Chapter 22 Permissions Acknowledgments Joan Didion the Year of Magical Thinking Also by Joan Didion Acclaim for Joan Didion s The Year of Magical Thinking Copyright This book is for John and. 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. building if he still had the log kept by the doormen for the night of December 30. I knew there was a log, I had been for three years president of the board of the building, the door log was intrinsic