Didion’s memoir quotes extensively from other books on
grief and mourning, highlighting the fact that Didion sees herself
as a student engaging in a process of self-education. The first
step taken by any reporter working on an in-depth story is to conduct
research, and Didion approaches John’s death as a puzzle she must
decipher. Didion believes that, once she is equipped with the proper
knowledge, she will be able to correct the problem—another manifestation
of her magical thinking. Though she reads grief literature and psychological
studies as a student, she has intensely emotional responses to what
she reads, indicating that her intellectual objectivity is affected
by her personal feelings. As much as she may want to simply absorb
the knowledge available to her, she repeatedly responds as if the
studies were written directly in response to her own experiences.
In the end, she finds that she really wants affirmation and comfort
from her readings. She finds support in unexpected sources, most
notably in Emily Post’s book on etiquette, which outlines the practical
steps one must take after the death of a loved one, without analysis
or judgment. Didion finds that she is not ready to fully engage
with the intellectual and philosophical questions of grief but needs
assurance and guidance through the first stages of her own emotional
response to John’s death.
As a result of her reading, Didion comes to understand
the shifting status of grief in American culture and attempts to
understand how cultural expectations inform her own behavior. Previously
a public, ritualized condition, mourning has become a private, guilt-inducing
phenomenon in today’s culture. Didion focuses on Emily Post’s book
of etiquette, noting that at the time of publication, death occurred
in the home and was a much more familiar part of life. Adults were
supposed to respond to death maturely and capably, tending to the
immediate needs of the person in mourning while respecting that
person’s grieving process. Over the course of the twentieth century,
death was pulled out of the home and into the hospital. As common
illnesses became less prevalent because of medical advances, death
was removed from the natural rhythms of home life and became a source
of shame. Didion’s own anxieties about exhibiting self-pity lead
her to focus on this cultural shift. She is acutely aware that she
feels obligated to respond to John’s death with stoic calm. She
questions this assumption, trying to determine whether her calm
exterior is a genuine product of shock or an internalized set of
cultural expectations. In looking to literature, she tries to ascertain
what reactions are expected, which reactions are appropriate, and
how her own reactions fit into those expectations.
Trained as a reader and writer, Didion uses the method
of poetry analysis that she finds in John’s high school anthology
as a tool for examining her responses to his death. Though simple
and direct, the questions that form John’s method resonate profoundly
with her own experience, as she tries to analyze the meaning and
experience of each event related to his death, the thought or reflection
inspired by that experience, and the emotions that are stirred up
by the experience as a whole. When applied to poetry, the method
asks the reader to examine the poem and its effects directly, in
an attempt to understand how individual responses speak to the larger
emotional experience that the poem creates. Didion realizes that
she cannot analyze her responses in such a measured way, and that
each decision she makes is informed by her inability to confront
John’s passing. By clinging to the idea that she can somehow make
John come back, Didion cannot step back and analyze her emotional
responses in the truly analytical way she wants.
