Grief and Magical Thinking: Escaping The Fear
My Mum often laughs about the first time I asked her what it means to die. She told my 5 year old self that it was like being at the playground when there’s too many people on the roundabout to get on. You have to wait your turn. Life, she said, is just like that. People are born and then they die, because there’s not enough space for everyone on earth at once. We take turns. At first, she was proud of how she had explained one of life’s most complex questions to such a tiny child. I nodded, composed, taking it all in. After digesting it I smiled and asked, almost rhetorically, “But I’ll never die, will I Mummy?” Trying not to laugh at my clear feelings of superiority to every other human on earth, she went over the roundabout analogy again, telling me that yes, I too will one day die. She was convinced that if she remained calm when talking about mortality, I would stay calm too. No chance - I screamed at the top of my lungs and hysterically cried for an hour.
Up until my Uncle Gary died during the first lockdown, I obsessed over death. Not my own, but the people around me. Most nights, I’d lay awake for hours sobbing, imagining life without the people I love, worrying how I’d cope with grief - a feeling I had never experienced as an adult. I couldn’t understand how everyone else managed to cope. When Gary died, I was surprised that the fear didn’t stop. What I had spent so many years anxiously anticipating had finally happened, but it was far more debilitating than I imagined it would be. The finality of it. The knowledge that this will happen many more times throughout my life. Despite living across the pond, Gary was a father figure to me (and to a lot of people). He made you believe that truly good people existed. He listened, really listened. My Mum summed him up perfectly: he was slow to anger, quick to laugh, and always made us feel wanted. Both he and my Aunty would be at the other end of the phone whenever we needed them. As an insomniac partial to regular 5am breakdowns, it was particularly handy that my biggest cheerleaders lived in a time zone eight hours behind.
Every few years, Mum would take me and my brothers to visit them in Malibu. I’ve never felt as safe as I did on the long drive from LAX to their home. Down Pacific Coast Highway in the dark, past the sounds of the ocean at Zuma beach, through the winding canyons. Country music turned down low. Essential oils from my Aunty’s soap kitchen and sawdust from my Uncle’s workshop clung to the car and lulled us to sleep. We’d wake up as we pulled up to their property, where the ground became rockier. Gary would get up to swing open the gate, and we’d slowly drive down the dirt road to the front of the house he’d built himself in the seventies. The stars were so bright you didn’t need a torch once your eyes adjusted. You gazed up, and clusters more would burst into sight, until the whole sky was twinkling. Hearing the crickets, breathing in the musky sweetness of the air, seeing shooting stars at night and bunnies in the morning. It was how life should be. Far away from London; the pollution, the pigeons, the noise, the anger, the dirt, the millions of people, the grey. It felt like all of that existed in another lifetime. Being in Malibu didn’t stop me from thinking about death. Instead, it rejigged my relationship with it. The idea of life being a roundabout didn’t make me panic here, or worry about who’s ride was coming to an end. Gary had made a ‘peace path’ behind the house: you would walk through the shrubbery, past a stream, and end up at a huge tree where the ashes of his late wife, son, and brother were scattered. There was a bench facing the tree, and we would often sit there silently for long periods of time.
I read ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’ exactly a year ago, just six months after Gary passed away. Joan Didion wrote the memoir after her husband John Gregory Dunne died suddenly of a heart attack during dinner. She reflects on their life together, his death, and the mourning process she went through. Thinking back to how I felt each night in Malibu, sitting under the stars after a day with my family, no longer obsessively worrying about the grief I would one day experience, reminds me of this passage from "The Year of Magical Thinking’:
“Several years ago, walking east on Fifty-seventh Street between Sixth and Fifth Avenues on a bright fall day, I had what I believed at the time to be an apprehension of death. It was an effect of light: quick sunlight dappling, yellow leaves falling (but from what? were there even trees on West Fifty-seventh Street?), a shower of gold, spangled, very fast, a falling of the bright… [it] seemed on the contrary transcendent, more beautiful than I could say, yet there is no doubt in my mind that what I had seen was death”
Didion’s depiction of magical thinking remains in constant flux between denial and bargaining, overthinking every little thing in the lead up to Dunne’s heart attack that could have prevented his death. Grieving her husband, she says, felt different than any grief she had experienced before. Losing her parents was painful of course, but another experience entirely. Dunne’s and Didion’s daily lives were entwined. Both being writers, they spent their days at home working in offices next to each other. Didion describes Dunne as being the buffer between her and the world. He answered the phone and he finished her sentences (more than she finished his, apparently, though she did finish his). A friend of theirs said that Didion and Dunne were one of the only married couples they knew who were almost always together. Their nephew describes how they stood in front of Dunne’s wardrobe after his death, looking at his clothes. He assumed they were both thinking the same thing - that the clothes needed to go. Instead, Didion turns to him and asks, “But what if he comes back?” To her nephew, and many people grieving, this “didn’t seem far-fetched at all. In fact, it seemed plausible”.
When Gary died, I worried that I didn’t send out enough good energy. Maybe my thoughts could have prevented it. Why didn’t I try hard enough to stop him slipping away? I still hoped that with the right mindset, maybe one day I would wake up and it would all just have been a bad dream. It wasn’t until finishing “The Year of Magical Thinking” that I felt some kind of closure. It helped me to focus on the feeling I have always feared. To sit with it, unpack it, learn to live with it. Get out of the grief vortex, take my medication, stop wasting my life worrying about the inevitable. Read more, reflect more, observe more. At the end of the book, she looks back to swimming with her husband in Portuguese Bend, remembering the power of the waves:
“We had to be in the water at the moment the tide was just right… Each time we did it I was afraid I was missing the swell, hanging back, timing it wrong. John never was. You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with change”.
I crave the feeling of the swell of the waves beneath my stomach when we’d boogie board at Zuma beach. The rush of butterflies that would come when we timed it properly, shooting across the beach with the water. My Uncle Gary would sit on the sand with our bags, facing the horizon, keeping a watchful eye on us all amongst the waves.
Stay present. You have to feel the swell change. You have to go with change.
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