When Death Reminds You to Live

Walking to work, my wife and I used to see them on their morning stroll through Central Park.

The man gave off just the faintest suggestion of "burly" and -- at the same time -- "frail."

The woman was a stick figure. Really. From a distance, you could not imagine that her legs could hold a body up, even one as slight as hers. And, if you did not know her, you might think, "Will someone please buy that bulimic a milkshake and make sure she keeps it down?"

Then we'd get closer and say, "Oh," and we'd keep our distance, although we actually knew them slightly: Joan Didion and John Dunne.

I knew John's brother Dominick and Dominick's son Griffin much better, and my wife and I were extremely close with his nephew Tony and his niece-by-marriage, Rosemary. But, instinctively, I gave the Dunnes space. It always seemed they were having a serious conversation and that the future of Western literature depended on its satisfactory conclusion.

Still, it was lovely to see them together. They both wrote at home, they looked over each other's work, they had dinner together; after decades of marriage, they were inseparable and glad of it. Yes, Joan had multiple sclerosis and John had a bum ticker, but year after year, there they were, getting away with it.

And then their only daughter Quintana took ill. Seriously ill. In-a-coma and near-death ill.

They came home from seeing her in the hospital and John sat down to read and have a scotch. And then "he stopped talking" and "slumped motionless."

Joan had a card in the kitchen with the phone number of a hospital on it, "in case someone in the building needed an ambulance." She called. People came. They worked on John, and then they took him to the hospital.

A man was waiting. He was not wearing scrubs. "I'm your social worker," he told Joan.

And, as she writes, "I guess that is when I must have known."

Joan Didion is not a rapid writer, but she wrote The Year of Magical Thinking (Knopf Publishing Group, 2005) quickly, the better to keep her prose fresh and raw. The book is very far from a howl of pain; though she explores the outer limits of grief, Didion is the kind of writer for whom even feeling passes through the brain. Which is to say that, in addition to her grief, we learn all about her thoughts about grief and her research about grief.

She does widow things -- gives away John's clothes -- but cannot give away his shoes: "He would need shoes if he was to return."

She also deals with things that few widows must: Eighteen days after John has died, her daughter becomes conscious and is told that her father is gone. Quintana's condition improves enough for her to go to California, where she steps off the plane and collapses. And Joan rushes to California for the next round of nail-biting worry.

"We try to keep the dead alive," she writes, "in order to keep them with us." But you can only go so far with magical thinking. On the last page, just as you hope she will, Joan Didion makes the most modest kind of "progress." You want to cheer. Then you remember something she did not know when she finished this book: On the eve of its publication, Quintana died.

Quintana's death reminded me of John's memorial service, which I attended. Afterward, family and friends were gathering for drinks at a club near my home. It had been a long day, and I had not seen much of our daughter, then just 2 years old. It was and is my habit to take a bath with her, read as she plays, and, from time to time, chat about this or that. And as the cab was about to pass our corner, I suddenly realized that being with our daughter was more important than talking to the New York literary elite. I got out and went upstairs.

I thought nothing more about that decision until I read of Quintana's death and read this book. It begins, "Life changes fast. Life changes in an instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." And I read through the book in one sitting -- not hard, as it's only 225 pages -- and then I looked for the kid because it was time, it was past time, to play with her.

Jesse Kornbluth is a New York-based journalist and founder of Head Butler.com, a cultural concierge site and free daily e-mail featuring information on new and classic books, movies and music.