Digging Up Dead...

January 2017

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Reflections on Grieving by  Roger Rosenblatt, Making Toast

                                                   Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

                                                   Antonia Fraser, Must You Go? My Life With Harold

                                                                               Pinter

                                                   Joyce Carol Oates, A Widow's Story

                                                   Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue

                                                                         Nights

 

Should a husband be worried if his wife starts reading books written by widows?

May be not- after all, I have also been reading works written by grieving parents...

So I think, at the moment, I am just digging up the dead

Unfortunately few of these books  have been worth the time

 

Which is why  I want to know what the acquisition editor was thinking who green lit Roger Rosenblatt's Making Toast about the death of his daughter?

Oh wait- maybe because they thought  someone like me would be willing to buy the book because it would get good reviews

After all - wouldn't the literati likely feel sorry for one of their own and write a glowing book review

They obviously did - but seriously?

It reads like something I would have written in high school

Yes- there are a few compelling passages, such as the description of how the author found his  young grandson some months after his mother's death, lying on the floor with his tongue hanging out, mimicking  how the child had found her on  the day she died

But these are few and far between in what is basically a litany of the daily duties of self sacrificing grandparents who have moved in to take care of the children

 

But Making Toast  does offer a useful warning .. .

Stay off that treadmill!

Which proved as deadly  for Rosenblatt's daughter as it did Sheryl Sandberg's husband

It's amazing the number of people taken out in the prime of their lives by this device ... including Elizabeth Alexander's husband

 

Thankfully, The Light of the World is a more interesting read than Making Toast

Primarily because Ficre sounds like someone I would have enjoyed knowing

 And Alexander keeps the reader engaged with prose that is almost dream like

You can feel Ficre's presence throughout the book- large, luminous, and full of life

So it is easy to feel Alexander's loss

Yet although well written, this book is basically another 200 page eulogy

 

So both of these works follow the John Gunther model from Death be Not Proud

Describe the deceased as a uniformly wonderful person who is sorely missed

Because they were so special

Now- that's original...

 

At least Antonia Fraser's Must You Go?: My Life With Harold Pinter moves beyond that worn out trope

But not in a necessarily better direction...

Fraser writes like she is taking notes for a historical biography ...surprise.

We went to tea at two, had dinner at eight with X - and they served fish

My God woman- you left your husband and the father of your children for this man- and all you can tell us is the time and date you met him?

And talk about that British stiff upper lip- when you tell your first husband you are leaving him he reacts as if you have just informed him that you will be spending the holiday in the south of France

Of course, Pinter dies at the end- but in a matter of fact way

So at least Fraser resists the urge to eulogize him

But his death comes across as an epilogue to a book that is basically about the coming and going of the literary set in England

 

In contrast, Joyce Carol Oates seems to have been genuinely put off her game by the death of her husband in A Widow's Story

But mostly because it disrupted her otherwise well ordered life

One gets the sense that Raymond was a very useful appendage  - and so, of course, soon after he died suddenly, she replaced him

But Oates doesn't tell us that part of the story- because this widow's story is all about her

How will she manage without the man who apparently fetched her tea.

In the end- quite well it seems, because he was ultimately easily-  and quickly- replaced

That said, Oates is a descriptive writer and I am pretty certain I could find my way around her house blindfolded after reading where Raymond was sitting when he first became ill and in how many rooms she had to hunt for her glasses after he died

 

So into this mostly sorry lot comes Joan Didion, who wrote not one, but two books about the deaths of  members of her immediate family: The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights

The second comes across as an afterthought because the death of her daughter seems to have been far less traumatic than the earlier death of her husband

So Blue Nights made me feel even sorrier for poor Quintana, who in her mother's other works always seemed like a piece of furniture shoved off in a corner in the glorious house of Didion and Dunne

Thus Blue Nights hardly rates a mention, but The Year of Magical Thinking is another story

 

 In this first book Didion describes the fugue state that so many patients  have told me they enter after the death of a  loved one

So it is about more than grief

She describes the sense of dissociation that comes with the loss of someone with whom one has shared a life...

The sleepless nights; disrupted thinking; and the inability to move forward- emotionally and sometimes physically

Which is why this is such a useful book- and the one I would recommend to those  who are not yet part of this unfortunate club- and especially to health care providers

 

Those of us familiar with Didion's oeuvre know hers was not always a happy marriage and Dunne is not eulogized here nor is he demonized

And he is not given a central role in what is basically a story about the impact of his death on his widow

 

So the tale Didion has to tell is not unique...

But what separates this book from these other works is that Didion's strength as a writer is well suited for this task

As she demonstrated In Where I'm From,  she has the ability, much like Orwell, to see clearly what others often miss

So she gets that death is about more than grief for the survivors

And that closure is not about coming to terms with the death of a loved one, but rather exiting the fog  filled state she so ably describes

 

So in The Year of Magical Thinking Didion lets the uninitiated in on the secret

Death is really a rite of passage - but for the living- not the dead

And one that leaves the survivors in a liminal state for far longer than most believe

The key word here is -- Year

For it was a year of magical thinking

Because this not a process that can be hurried or talked through

It is almost physiological- and so must run its course

And that insight is what makes The Year of Magical Thinking worth reading