This morning in bed, I finished (re-)reading Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, which I liked a lot, but not as much as the critics did. In case you haven’t read it, it’s a writer’s memoir about the sudden death of her husband (of 40 years) and the writer’s subsequent grief.
And now – again – I have a choice as to what to say…
do I tell you
(1) that I like the bit at the end where she says: “I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to try to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let them become the photograph on the table.”
I have a lovely photograph of my mother, but it sits on the bookshelf behind me in my study. I have not yet felt able to have it next to my computer, where the picture of my father sits. My mother has yet to become “the photograph on the table.”
or do I tell you
(2) that I was so upset by the thought that Dave (like Joan Didion’s husband) might have a heart attack and die, that when he came in the room I told him I needed to learn what to do if he had a heart attack, and he said “Knowing how cack-handed you are with anything practical, I'd rather you didn’t try,” and I said, “I'm not altogether unpractical. I can make pastry.” And he said “Well, if I have a heart attack, you must go off and make pastry.”