It is horrible to see oneself die without children. Napoléon Bonaparte said that.
What greater grief can there be for mortals than to see their children dead. Euripides said that.
When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children. I said that.
I suppose I experienced this book out of order, having not read The Year of Magical Thinking or, I must confess, anything by Joan Didion, but I am at the mercy of what library books I can find to listen to on my daily walk, and am pleased to have finally met this author.
At one point in Blue Nights, Didion describes a box her daughter Quintana made as a child to hold her "sundries". The box was divided into areas labelled "gold" and "jewels" and "my IRA" and (heartbreakingly for the author) "little toys". Didion describes the box as she holds it in her hands, five years after Quintana has died. What I was most amazed by was the fact that Didion was still in possession of the box, as well as art projects and school papers, her daughter's private school uniforms and childhood journals. I am unsentimental about things, about mementos, and the fact that Didion not only kept all of these artefacts but had moved them with her across country makes me wonder to what degree I have simply discarded my own kids' history with their old papers and projects. And then I wonder if that's the key difference between myself and an author: does Didion also hoard all the memories and scenes of her own history, jealously guarding against their loss, hedging against the day that they will come in handy?
For a book about Didion's daughter's death, there are few details about the death itself, beyond the fact that her final illness struck suddenly and progressed quickly. I googled Quintana Roo Dunne, looking for a face to put with the name, and many of the results were people asking the question, "Did Quintana Roo Dunne die of alcoholism?" I'm not a gossipy person so I didn't click any of the links, the innuendo was more information than I needed from google, but it did make me curious about how Didion chose what information to include. I see other readers here conclude that Didion wrote Blue Nights to work out if she was a good mother: If she put too much pressure on the young Quintana to grow up before her time-- to need a box of sundries to hold both "my IRA" and "little toys"; if she seriously dealt with the abandonment fears common to adopted children; if she should have seen the end coming from the time Quintana was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. And maybe this is why, although I had expected to be affected by a mother's contemplation of the loss of her daughter, I found the book a little impersonal; perhaps it was such a personal meditation for Didion that she forgot to include the audience. I will be interested to explore this author further as I understand that I have joined her conversation right at the point where she fears she has lost her gifts.
It ends:
Vanish. Pass into nothingness: the Keats line that frightened her. Fade as the blue nights fade, go as the brightness goes. Go back into the blue. I myself placed her ashes in the wall. I myself saw the cathedral doors locked at six. I know what it is I am now experiencing. I know what the frailty is, I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked doors. The fear is for what is still to be lost. You may see nothing still to be lost. Yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her.When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children. That's a line to ponder. Losing both her husband and then her only child within months of each other, Joan Didion knows a grief I cannot imagine. But motherhood and loving one's children-- that I understand in my bones, and though I have my daughters with me still, and despite the fact that I am not the type of mother to preserve their histories, their mementos, their stuff, there is not a day in their lives on which I do not see them.
