I do remember throwing out whatever was on the plates and in the kitchen when I came home from New York Hospital. I have no memory of what we meant to eat. “I said I would build a fire, we could eat in.
In that grief, she tries to reconstruct the hours prior to Dunne’s death, the days before he slumps at the dinner table, as if to remember every detail as they are the most important of their lives together. And while reading about food at funerals etiquette may not be my way of grieving, it is hers, and the reader can see all the ways grief looks different in us all. She turns to Emily Post’s 1922 book of etiquette, where under “funerals” she discovers the details of etiquette with the recently bereaved, funerals, and food. Didion explores all of the questions and struggles to find the answers, which is altogether what her “waves” of grief are in the days, weeks, and months that follow Dunne’s death. Her friends and family are nearby, but it is her reading about death and dying that the reader begins to understand her desire to unravel the mystery as to what happened that night at the dinner table.įor anyone who has had a loved one die suddenly, there are questions with few answers. Auden and continues her daily walks in Central Park. She wraps herself up with poetry from W.H. Lewis’ A Grief Observed, the journal he wrote after the death of his wife. She seeks support in literature she loves, including C.S. Anyone who has experienced the sudden death of a loved one understands the depth of her words, and her grief. “Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be,” Didion writes. Finding comfort from literary greats about grief » MORE: Are you preparing for the loss of a loved one? Get support now. (note: Quintana Roo Dunne died almost a year later, on Augand Didion wrote a memoir of her death, Blue Nights in 2011.) We begin to see that so many of those discerning decisions after a death must wait for a daughter to be told her father has died. Her husband dies the same evening after visiting their recently married daughter, Quintana, in the Intensive Care Unit at a local New York City hospital. The reader begins to get the picture of the pain as Didion sets the exposition in the first chapter. The details that she describes of preparing dinner, making a fire in the fireplace, what they were eating when he stopped talking, and how he slumped makes the reader feel like they are at the dinner table too, watching the surreal events of someone who is taking their last breaths. It’s as if we are all together traveling with Didion as she returns back to the night of Dunne’s death with questions about her memories. She captures what life is without him, and brings the reader on the journey with her. What is The Year of Magical Thinking About?ĭidion’s memoir tackles all the mundane details that tend to affect those who are in the midst of real grief and loss.
In the ensuing chapters, the reader discovers not only the details of John Gregory Dunne’s death, but the intimate details of their life together and especially the way they worked together as well-known writers.
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