A few moments ago, I finished the above book by Joan Didion. I read it because her husband and daughter died.

I read it because I have a husband and a daughter.

Grief.

I finished the book quickly. Reading it was painful. I wanted it to be over. The writing was beautiful, and I still wanted it to be over.

She used short sentences. These short sentences of hers were more painful than longer ones.

You could tell she led the life of a highly educated woman — trips to Honolulu, New York, LA and so on — on a regular basis. Homes in Brentwood, Malibu and the UWS or UES. She attended Berkeley. Her husband attended Princeton. Money rarely seemed to be an issue. When it was, they flew to Honolulu or Paris anyway.

While I read the book, I could not help but think of her life and how easy it would seem in comparison to people with less.

However, she is telling her own story and not someone else’s. She went to those places and had that life.

This is the second book I’ve read in the past year that honors the dead spouse of the writer. When I wrote “honors,” I wanted to use a word that meant something about memory. I did not want to use the word “discusses” and the right word seemed important. The book honors the person and shares the experience of grief.

If I tell my friends about this great book, many will shy away from the grief and sadness.

One of my friends read it and wondered why she did that to herself when her own mother is dying.

Didion’s grief and experience of grief and mourning shows up in every word as she recounts medical files, shares bits of computer documents, and includes passages from medical texts.

Like many writers — are you like this? — she researches endlessly to find out more. Was he dead when he collapsed at the table? Could she have stopped it? She notes that the high achievers in her life, including herself, think they can conquer the uncontrollable with the right phone call or pulling of strings.

She wonders when her husband actually died.

After looking up “lividity” in a medical textbook, she calculates her husband died immediately.

From wikipedia, lividity is:

a settling of the blood in the lower (dependent) portion of the body, causing a purplish red discoloration of the skin: when the heart is no longer agitating the blood, heavy red blood cells sink through the serum by action of gravity. This discoloration does not occur in the areas of the body that are in contact with the ground or another object, as the capillaries are compressed.

Coroners can use the presence or absence of livor mortis as a means of determining an approximate time of death.

By the time her husband was brought the hospital, lividity indicated he’d been dead about one hour.

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Could this book have been written years ago?

On a poet mother listserv, it was discussed that women did not write of children, birthing times, and “women” events before the confessionalists. Only in more recent memory have women written of these events.

I will now mix up poetry and prose.

We have Alice by Calvin Trillin and The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. Would these books have existed before 1945? Would they have been allowed to exist? Would anyone — man or woman — be “allowed” to discuss the intimacies of grief and mourning before the world was prepared for it by the likes of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton and many others.

If you know of prose examples from before 1945, please share them with me in the comments below.