Time is the school in which we learn

In May, 1998, the day before I went to Japan, my mother and I walked along Oriental Parade in Wellington. It was a sunny day. We sat on one of the park benches on the Parade and looked out across the harbour to the dock cranes and the office blocks. My mother told me that one of things she missed when my father died was someone to tell things to. I knew that what she was telling me then was that this was what she would miss again when I went overseas. At that time I was supposed to be going for a year, but it turned into five, almost six years in the end.

The story my mother told me about missing the simple act of being able to tell my father something came back to me when I was reading Joan Didion’s book The Year of Magical Thinking.

In December 2003 Didion’s daughter fell ill and went into septic shock. While she was hospitalised and put into a coma, Joan’s husband John died of a heart attack. They had been married for forty years.

For a long time I read The Year of Magical Thinking and enjoyed it, but didn’t feel the impact I thought I was supposed to be feeling. When people write “I can’t imagine dying without this book” in the blurb on the back cover I think it is fair enough for the reader to expect impact.

The impact came in Chapter Seventeen when Didion’s record began to resonate against the stories in my own family:

I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I need to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of a response. I read something in the paper I would normally have read to him. I noticed some change in the neighbourhood that would interest him. (p.194)

I know that in 1978 the Terrace Tunnel opened in Wellington. I believe this was the final stage in the new motorway development. This was the motorway development that controversially bisected the Bolton Street Cemetery. I also know that Star Wars came to New Zealand in 1978. I know both of these things because my father died in 1978. My mother told me that my father wanted to see Star Wars when he was sick, and that they went, and that he enjoyed it but she didn’t because it was so loud and he was ill. She also told me that it seemed like a race at times when it came to the Terrace Tunnel; would he live to see it opened?

My mother and father were married for quite a long time given that he died when I was five. Given that he died when I was five I have not learned a lot about how a marriage works from my mother and father; just about how it is remembered. Although Didion’s book is about the death of her husband it is also about her marriage: “Marriage is memory, marriage is time.” The final part of the book is about how marriage and a person are begun to be remembered:

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.

Let them become the photograph on the table.
Let them become the name on the trust accounts.
Let go of them in the water.

Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of them in the water.

I have lived my life with the photograph on the table. It was only really when I became a father that I began to be bothered by silly questions. Was my father taller than me or shorter? What did his voice sound like? Was he a dad that changed nappies or was he a chauvinist? It is curious that this book makes me reflect on these things, because most of the book is not likely to.

Quite a lot of this book specifically describes the events surrounding John’s death, quite a lot is about the daughter’s illnesses. Didion’s observations are interesting. She notices for example that when tragedy erupts the survivors and witnesses normally note afterward how ordinary the day was before the lightening strike of catastrophe. She notices that although grief is actually seriously deranging it is not something people expect treatment for even in the modern American age of counselling and therapy. These are interesting things to say and combined with the awfulness of the events described make the first two thirds of the book compelling.

However, I felt that the book only really began to speak in its final third:

We are not idealised wild things. We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.

Time is the school in which we learn, / Time is the fire in which we burn: Delmore Schwartz again.

I remember despising the book Dylan Thomas’s widow Caitlin wrote after her husband’s death, Leftover Life to Kill. I remember being dismissive of, even censorious, about her “self-pity,” her “whining,” her “dwelling on it.” Leftover Life to Kill was published in 1957. I was twenty-two years old. Time is the school in which we learn.

I think this is very good writing. The death of my father means more to me now that it did when I was five. The phrase: “marriage is memory, marriage is time” makes sense to me now. Fifteen years ago I would not have noticed these six words in the book. Time is the school.

What do we learn in the school of time? Wouldn’t most of us rather be twenty-two again and able to sneer at the middle-aged? I used to think so, but now I must acknowledge that when I was twenty-two I had no wife, and no child, and was really only a boy who hadn’t noticed that his father was dead. I was a boy that didn’t really understand how loss operated in the life of those left behind. It is now the time for my generation to begin to understand those things for themselves.

The Year of Magical Thinking
Joan Didion
Fourth Estate, London, 2005