The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion Read Free Book Online

smile no longer exist, sold to US Airways and then painted off the planes.
    Ernie’s no longer exists, but was briefly re-created by Alfred Hitchcock, for
Vertigo.
James Stewart first sees Kim Novak at Ernie’s. Later she falls from the bell tower (also re-created, an effect) at Mission San Juan Bautista.
    We were married at San Juan Bautista.
    On a January afternoon when the blossoms were showing in the orchards off 101.
    When there were still orchards off 101.
             
    N o. The way you got sideswiped was by going back. The blossoms showing in the orchards off 101 was the incorrect track.
    For several weeks after it happened I tried to keep myself on the correct track (the narrow track, the track on which there was no going back) by repeating to myself the last two lines of “Rose Aylmer,” Walter Savage Landor’s 1806 elegy to the memory of a daughter of Lord Aylmer’s who had died at age twenty in Calcutta. I had not thought of “Rose Aylmer” since I was an undergraduate at Berkeley, but now I could remember not only the poem but much of what had been said about it in whichever class I had heard it analyzed. “Rose Aylmer” worked, whoever was teaching this class had said, because the overblown and therefore meaningless praise for the deceased in the first four lines (“Ah, what avails the sceptred race! / Ah, what the form divine! / What every virtue, every grace! / Rose Aylmer, all were thine”) gets brought into sudden, even shocking relief by “the hard sweet wisdom” of the last two lines, which suggest that mourning has its place but also its limits: “A night of memories and sighs / I consecrate to thee.”
    “‘A
night
of memories and sighs,’” I remembered the lecturer repeating. “
A night.
One night. It might be all night but he doesn’t even say
all night,
he says
a night,
not a matter of a lifetime, a matter of some hours.”
    Hard sweet wisdom. Clearly, since “Rose Aylmer” had remained embedded in my memory, I believed it as an undergraduate to offer a lesson for survival.
             
    D ecember 30, 2003.
    We had seen Quintana in the sixth-floor ICU at Beth Israel North.
    Where she would remain for another twenty-four days.
    Unusual dependency (is that a way of saying “marriage”? “husband and wife”? “mother and child”? “nuclear family”?) is not the only situation in which complicated or pathological grief can occur. Another, I read in the literature, is one in which the grieving process is interrupted by “circumstantial factors,” say by “a delay in the funeral,” or by “an illness or second death in the family.” I read an explanation, by Vamik D. Volkan, M.D., a professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, of what he called “re-grief therapy,” a technique developed at the University of Virginia for the treatment of “established pathological mourners.” In such therapy, according to Dr. Volkan, a point occurs at which:

    we help the patient to review the circumstances of the death—how it occurred, the patient’s reaction to the news and to viewing the body, the events of the funeral, etc. Anger usually appears at this point if the therapy is going well; it is at first diffused, then directed toward others, and finally directed toward the dead. Abreactions—what Bibring [E. Bibring, 1954, “Psychoanalysis and the Dynamic Psychotherapies,”
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association
2:745 ff.] calls “emotional reliving”—may then take place and demonstrate to the patient the actuality of his repressed impulses. Using our understanding of the psychodynamics involved in the patient’s need to keep the lost one alive, we can then explain and interpret the relationship that had existed between the patient and the one who died.

    But from where exactly did Dr. Volkan and his team in Charlottesville derive their unique understanding of “the psychodynamics involved in the patient’s need