The Year of Magical Thinking summary

The moments after John’s cardiac arrest were a blur for Joan. Not only was she in shock from the surreal-seeming events that were rapidly unfolding before her eyes, but certain key pieces of information were also withheld from her. Nonetheless, in the year that followed, Joan was able to reconstruct many of the details of what happened.

To do this, she had to go beyond her limited and unreliable perceptions and memories of the evening. Drawing on her background as a journalist, she supplemented her recollections with primary source documents, such as hospital reports and even the entry log kept by her apartment building’s doorman. By tracking down these documents and piecing them together, she was able to establish a precise chronology of the events that would change her life forever.

It’s difficult to imagine anything more darkly absurd than filling out hospital admittance forms for someone already dead. When it’s a distressed wife filling them out for her beloved husband whose heart stopped beating nearly an hour ago, the absurdity borders on cosmic cruelty. 

But while she was in the hospital reception waiting for news about John’s condition, Joan actually found some solace in doing the paperwork. To begin with, it gave her a sense of agency and usefulness. She was no longer expected to stand around as a passive observer, helplessly watching medical professionals do their work. She had something to do – something that she thought could help John with his recovery. 

Remember that at the very moment Joan was learning of her husband’s death, her daughter Quintana’s life was also hanging in the balance. In another medical facility across town, Quintana was still lying comatose in a hospital bed – her mind unconscious, her pneumonia and sepsis being treated and her condition remaining critical.

Fortunately, it stabilized and improved from there. About two weeks later, on January 15, 2004, the doctors were able to remove her breathing tube and reduce her intake of sedatives, which allowed her to finally wake up. 

At times, it seems as if there’s a strange poetry to the stories of our lives. The more we look back on them, the more we find conspicuous rhymes and hidden relationships between the elements of which they are comprised. 

That was certainly the case for Joan: Christmas, 1990; Christmas, 2003; St. John the Divine; Honolulu; Quintana’s illness; Quintana’s wedding; Joan’s marriage to John; the ups and downs of their lives together; their shared vocation of writing; John’s death; John’s funeral. As Joan traced the direct and indirect connections between places, times, events and experiences like these, she found an intricate network of invisible threads that wove them all together into a single, sprawling web of memory.

In the immediate wake of John’s death, Joan could hardly go anywhere or do anything for more than a couple of minutes without being reminded of him. She’d be out driving, walking or simply living her life when, all of a sudden, she’d see something that would trigger a cascade of memories.

It could be as simple as passing the street of a friend they once visited together, or a movie theater where they’d seen a film decades ago. In any case, because of the web that linked all of her memories, one recollection would lead to another and then another, until her mind arrived at something painful.

In the late 1960s, when Joan wrote her first column for Life magazine, she didn’t want to be in Honolulu; she wanted to be in Saigon. The Vietnam War was raging and she yearned to be where the action was, covering one of the most important stories of the era. Instead, she was being asked to write a short personal column while staying in a place that most people associate with tropical beach vacations.

Given the gravity of what was going on in the world, the column seemed rather frivolous. Adding insult to injury, the magazine’s editor was sending reporters to Saigon – but only “the boys,” as he called them. She felt frustrated and humiliated. 

Sometime in late February or early March of 2004, about two months after her husband’s death, Joan finally gave in to the advice that many of her friends had been pushing on her. She started clearing the clothes out of John’s closet – an act she saw as one of the rituals that people go through to deal with their grief.

She began with a shelf of John’s outdoor clothing, which didn’t have much emotional resonance for her. He wore it when he went out for a walk, and he usually went out alone. Once she finished with the T-shirts and sweatshirts, she stopped.

In the end, Joan found limited closure in a manner that was both predictable and unpredictable: reading.

This was predictable insofar as Joan was both a writer and an avid reader, who had turned to books for insight ever since she was a child. But it was also unpredictable insofar as the piece of writing that helped her the most wasn’t a work of literature, psychology or self-help.

In the months following John’s death, Joan did quite a bit of reading before she received his autopsy report.

In addition to various works of literature, poetry and practical guides on grieving (most of which she found useless), she also read a diverse array of works from psychology and medicine. These ranged from the classics of Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein to more contemporary articles in scientific journals and medical manuals that touched upon grief.

When Quintana fell and injured her head, she and her husband were in the process of leaving Los Angeles International Airport. They’d just landed there from New York, arriving in California for a well-earned vacation to Malibu. After John’s death and Quintana’s various health travails, she and her husband wanted to restart their lives.

But now, instead, their lives were again in limbo – and so was Joan’s. As soon as she heard the news about her daughter, she flew out to California as quickly as she could. When she saw Quintana lying unconscious in a hospital bed at the UCLA Medical Center, her first words to her were equal parts reassurance and promise: “You’re safe. I’m here.”

If you’re hoping for a happy ending to this story, you’re going to be disappointed. As Joan herself puts it, this isn’t like a movie in which the death of the husband is basically “the credit sequence for a new life” – a life in which the wife discovers that it’s possible to “love more than one person.”

As we’ve seen, there was more to Joan’s marriage than love, and there was more to the death of her husband than the loss of a single person. It was also the loss of their relationship. That relationship, in turn, was bound up in a thick web of memories and habits – a shared life no longer shared.