Life Changes Fast

Life changes fast.
Life changes in an instant
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

So writes Joan Didion for the first time after discovering her husband of forty years, John Gregory Dunne, dead on the floor of their Manhattan apartment on December 30, 2003. Didion took nearly a year before she was able to place pen to paper in order to record her thoughts all the while she was struggling with the loss of her husband and the impending death of her daughter from a debilitating stroke. Didion's latest memoir captures the pain, the lucidity and the terrible clarity of one reeling from the death of a loved one.

Joan Didion changed my life, though she'll never know it. In the junior year of college, I enrolled in Dick Oglesby's History of California course in my Spring 1994 quarter. Oglesby loved assigning a vast amount of reading and his California course was no different. I loved his lectures and always read the assigned readings but was apprehensive about the text covering the "modern" era. That was until I opened the cover of "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" and skimmed the first chapter. A woman involved in the destruction of her family and her unhappiness situated in the culture of southern California seemed to hit me where no other book had before. Since that assigned reading, I have re-read that book probably four or five times in completion and several of its chapters countless times. Immediately I was attracted to Didion's logical and surgical analysis of life in the golden state during a time, not of a summer of love or of self-discovery but of a time in which she stated society had performed "an abortion on itself and [had] botched the job." Not the "Last Days of the Great State of California" and a satirical yet excising look into the contradictory and short-sided political goings-on of the Republican Party and conservative movement of the late 1960s and 1970s but a funeral elegy of the nation's state most likely to star in "American Beauty" with Kevin Spacey. "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" led to "The White Album" which led to her writings on 9/11 and the deceit of the federal government and the nation's foreign policy failures which then led to "Where I Was From" which was a memoir of her past that could have been the inverse of my family history: how one had arrived in California yet spent the remainder of one's life as far away as possible from it.
For Christmas, I gave myself Didion's latest book which I had not asked anyone else for but luckily found at Costco the day after. I devoured this latest book in just two and a half days as I could not leave Joan as her husband had. How anyone could live their life knowing the unthinkable about her/his spouse, the most painful and yet undeniable part of one's life and marriage and still remain sane and rational is proof of the resiliency of the human spirit. Joan Didion was not the first person to lose a spouse nor to deal with pain and grief. And yet, this author has captured the struggle of just how someone who understands life can easily deny or remove oneself from the everyday reality that death is real and permanent; it is practically miraculous that people are able to recover from the death of their closest friends and loved ones but in reality, loss and pain are the most sobering and real parts of life. Didion does not dwell on death but writes of acceptance and her ulitmate acknowledgement that at the drop of a hat, one's reality can fatally and fatefully change.

Listening to, bopping to, digging and ultimately missing those salt peanuts, John. Your music truly made me dizzy as a bird.