Formal #2: Grief as Mental Illness

In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion spends a great deal of time pondering the idea that grief is a form of mental illness, manifested as temporary insanity. She rejects the idea that grief is simply intense sadness by demonstrating how grief leads to extreme denial, delusional wishful thinking, the belief in individual ability to control outcomes, reduced functioning, and a shaken sense of self. She believes that magical thinking, the central theme of the memoir, is the childlike belief that we are able to control outcomes and change the world around us through the intensity of our wishes and desires.

Didion begins her memoir with the first thoughts that came to mind as she sat down at the computer for the first time, five months following her husband’s very sudden death; Life changes fast. Life changes in an instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. On December 30, 2003, Didion and her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, were about to sit down to dinner after spending the day visiting their only child, daughter Quintana, who lie in a hospital in a clinically-induced coma due to septic shock, when John, in mid-sentence, with hand in the air making a point in conversation, fell dead over the table. He suffered a “sudden massive coronary event”, a heart attack. This book, she wrote, was “my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself” (p7).

Once the initial shock wore off, and she was able to resume caring for her daughter, she realized that her grieving mental state resembled that of the clinically insane. She recognized that through the winter (John died in late December) and spring, there had been occasions on which “I was incapable of thinking rationally. I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome” (p35). She was unable to read the obituaries as they came out, just as she was unable a few months later to view John’s picture as it flashed across the television screen during the 2004 Academy Awards “In Memoriam” montage. These disturbed her because they proved John was dead, and she did not yet believe this. She let other people believe it, but if she herself believed it, he might not come back. While packing up his clothes to give away to charities, she was unable to give away all of his shoes. “I stood there for a moment, then realized why: he would need shoes if he was to return” (p37). She comes to believe, in her state of grief/mental illness, that if she controlled certain aspects of her circumstance, she could bring John back.

She was unable to focus on topics of conversation with friends. She was unaware of day or time. Sights, scents, street corners; everything seemed to bring on memories of the past, of her time spent with John and Quintana. Didion quoted Melanie Klein’s 1940 Mourning and it’s Relation to Manic-Depressive States. “The mourner is in fact ill, but because this state of mind is common and seems so natural to us, we do not call mourning an illness. . .to put my conclusion more precisely: I should say that in mourning the subject goes through a modified and transitory manic-depressive state and overcomes it” (p34). Obviously, the overcoming it was what Didion was striving for and could not seem to achieve. Following John’s memorial service, a few months following his death so that Quintana could take part, Didion noted the feeling of emptiness following it. After all, she had gone through the motions, did what she was expected to do to mourn, and he did not come back.

After a year of waiting for John to return, enduring floods of memories that overwhelmed her and removed her from her surroundings, avoiding places and situations that reminded her of life with John and Quintana, she was able to come to some resolution. “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” (p226).

Just 18 months following John’s death, as Didion began to live life again and let John be dead, Quintana died.