Coping with grief through Joan Didion's and Eleanor Clift's eyes
Five days after her adult daughter was placed in a drug-induced coma in order to treat a raging infection, Joan Didion lost her husband. John Gregory Dunne, the writer with whom she had spent nearly every day of 39 years, died at the dinner table in the living room of their New York City apartment.
It was Dec. 30, 2003: They hadn't even made it through Christmas week.
The two events, almost back to back, were overwhelming. In the weeks and months after John's death, Didion knew she was sinking. Her usual survival technique -- reading everything she could about the subject -- wasn't working: Despite her intellectual command of the grief literature (both literary and professional), in her heart of hearts she still expected her husband to come back.
As she writes in her memoir, "The Year of Magical Thinking," that is why she did not read any of the obituaries written about John. And it is why she recoiled from the idea of disposing of his shoes (what would he have to wear on his feet when he returned?).
In this case, death was not unexpected
In March 2005, Eleanor Clift, a contributing editor at Newsweek, also experienced the death of her husband in their living room.
Tom Brazaitis, a longtime Washington, D.C., journalist, had been diagnosed with Stage 4 kidney cancer five years earlier. He had spent the last 10 weeks of his life in a hospital bed that hospice services had set up on the first floor of their home.
Clift has written a memoir of the couple's experiences, "Two Weeks of Life: A Memoir of Love, Death and Politics," which was released in March.
Unlike Didion, Clift was not blindsided by her husband's death. She knew four months earlier, when Tom's oncologist said they would take a break from chemotherapy, that he really meant they had run out of options.
Clift's experiences provide a counterpoint to Didion's in other ways: For one thing, Clift did not choose to immerse herself in the grief literature. Instead, she kept busy.
When I spoke with her in May, Clift told me, "There's probably a category of people who handle grief with distraction, and I would fall in that category. I'm rarely psychologically unemployed . . . [Writing the book] helped me order my thoughts and, most importantly, filled in a big chunk of time -- 2 1/2 years."
Didion seems to be a muller, a rehasher. Clift is a doer. Neither method of coping can be said to trump the other.
