"We did the right thing. I would do it again," poet Jane Kenyon said. This was during the last days of her life, after 15 months of chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant had failed to keep leukemia at bay. In his memoir of their life together and her death, The Best Day the Worst Day, her husband, poet Donald Hall, does not make it clear what exactly Kenyon was referring to. There were many crucial decisions before this moment, from marriage in the '70s (Hall was 19 years older than Kenyon, his former student) to the duo's move to Hall's family farm in New Hampshire (Hall had to give up tenure at University of Michigan to make the move) to the decision to spend decades surrounded mainly by their pets and poetry.
Certainly, this final choice is not the "right thing" Kenyon was referring to as she focused her final energetic moments of life organizing what she knew would be her posthumous collection of poems, working out what library would get her papers and even authoring (with Hall) her obituary, wanting to make sure that her Guggenheim fellowship was mentioned.
In the case of writer John Gregory Dunne, who died while sitting at dinner, according to wife Joan Didion's account in The Year of Magical Thinking, his obituary was the first detail handled by the friend Didion called on to help her after she returned from the hospital a widow. Didion's reaction to the fact of the obituary is horror, even though she had already authorized an autopsy. "'Obituary,' unlike 'autopsy,' which was between me and John and the hospital, meant it had happened." The obituary is the first thing written about a death. Both of these books revolve around writers married to writers, facing the death of a spouse and, perhaps inevitably, writing about it.
Hall and Kenyon have a clear faith in the poetry she produced being an accounting of a life well-spent; he is a meticulous keeper of his wife's literary legacy. Didion, by contrast, shows us Dunne a night or so before he dies, lamenting that all his work was "worthless." Didion does not think to dispute the point. This is not to say she agrees with her husband's brutal assessment of his writing, but rather that the relative value of his words is irrelevant to her suffering, which at the time of Dunne's death also included their only child being in a coma with no clear outcome in sight.
In many ways, the truly crucial difference between these books is tone. Hall is writing his account a full decade after Kenyon's death, but Didion is pathetically more in the midst of things than she realizes: Her daughter died after the book was completed, a possibility not even hinted at in her pages (where a full recovery seems to have taken place).
She is also overwhelmed with the shock and surprise at what she takes to be her husband's totally unexpected death. Yet Dunne had a pacemaker, and Didion quotes the cardiologist as calling his particular heart condition "the widow-maker." How reliable is this famous journalist as a witness to this story? By Didion's own accounting, not very. In fact, if the title of the book suggests that reading this will in some way be uplifting, don't be deceived. By The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion is speaking of her self-deception, her insanity—in short, her inability to apply her skill as a writer to this problem with the success she has encountered in every other situation in her life.
"I have been a writer my entire life. As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs. ... The way I write is who I am, or have become. ... This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning."
The Year of Magical Thinking is a howl of irrational grief. As a memoir, it lacks a coherent narrative, and both Dunne and the couple's sick daughter hardly leave a fingerprint on the reader's mind. We learn little of their personalities, their lives, their interests. This book wasn't written for us. Didion is her own intended audience, and she already knows her husband and daughter too well. For the reader who doesn't, what remains in The Year of Magical Thinking is plenty: the texture and rhythms of Didion's unmitigated pain, agony and insanity at what happened to those she loved. Didion does not offer anything like the traditional sense of catharsis that comes at the end of irrational grief. She is still in the midst. The strength of her story is in its lack of balance, of comprehension; it has a lunatic clarity.
The phrase "lunatic clarity" comes from Hall's description of his own mental state after his wife's death: "Everything I did, those first weeks and months, I did deliberately with lunatic clarity, without judgment."
Didion's experience is one that Hall understands in part because his book of poems from this period, Without, matches Didion's howl. The Best Day the Worst Day is a more reasoned and detailed account placed squarely in space and time, packed with details of Kenyon and Hall's life together, their family and her death. At times all the detail and specificity can be dull: pages on the behavior and history of his cats, lots of minutiae about changing blood counts and medical procedures that becomes redundant, and far too much information about Kenyon's gardening. There are also details we did not need—including Hall's discussion of his vasectomy and a detailed account of his prosthetic penis implant. Still, the accumulation of detail makes for frequently devastating moments, as when Kenyon's bone marrow transplant fails. For 200 pages covering 15 months since her leukemia diagnosis, we had watched her suffer, suffer and suffer more, only for the reward of the possibility that the transplant might help. When it doesn't, the doctors have nothing left to do but send her home to die, which takes about 11 days, with Hall at her side every moment.
Hall saves the soul-baring for his poetry. In prose, he is proudly a man of letters—every detail is here, but Hall, unlike in Without, has managed to bring to bear his well-known New Critic perspectives of time, intelligence and analysis. That perhaps accounts for the slow stretches, but also, for that reason this book works, offering nuances that, for lack of a better word, bring wisdom to bear on his life after his loss. Not that this wisdom is necessarily uplifting. Rather, Hall notes, "If anyone had asked Jane and me, 'Which was the best year of your lives together?' we could have agreed on an answer: 'The one we remember least.' There were sorrowful years of disease and death, cancer and depression and mania."
The Year of Magical Thinking is a raw, myopic focus on one of those horribly memorable years, whereas Hall's book deals with the reality once the magic of crazed grief subsides. For survivors, all loss must at some point gather back together the full fabric of experience, despite—and Hall and Didion would agree—the tear from death being perpetual and beyond mending.