Free The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

dress smelled of wet wool. On takeoff he held my hand until the plane began leveling.
    He always did.
    Where did that go?
    In a magazine I see a Microsoft advertisement that shows the platform of the Porte des Lilas metro station in Paris.
    I found yesterday in the pocket of an unworn jacket a used metro ticket from that November trip to Paris. “Only Episcopalians ‘take’ communion,” he had corrected me one last time as we left St. Sulpice. He had been correcting me on this point for forty years. Episcopalians “took,” Catholics “received.” It was, he explained each time, a difference in attitude.

    Not where are they now, dead seven years,
    But what they were then?

    That last cardioversion: April 2003. The one that had required two shocks. I remember a doctor explaining why it was done under anesthesia. “Because otherwise they jump off the table,” he said. December 30, 2003: the sudden jump when the ambulance crew was using the defibrillating paddles on the living room floor. Was that ever a heartbeat or was it just electricity?
    The night he died or the night before, in the taxi between Beth Israel North and our apartment, he said several things that for the first time made me unable to readily dismiss his mood as depression, a normal phase of any writer’s life.
    Everything he had done, he said, was worthless.
    I still tried to dismiss it.
    This might not be normal, I told myself, but neither was the condition in which we had just left Quintana.
    He said that the novel was worthless.
    This might not be normal, I told myself, but neither was it normal for a father to see a child beyond his help.
    He said that his current piece in
The New York Review,
a review of Gavin Lambert’s biography of Natalie Wood, was worthless.
    This might not be normal, but what in the past several days had been?
    He said he did not know what he was doing in New York. “Why did I waste time on a piece about Natalie Wood,” he said.
    It was not a question.
    “You were right about Hawaii,” he said then.
    He may have meant that I had been right a day or so before when I said that when Quintana got better (this was our code for “if she lives”) we could rent a house on the Kailua beach and she could recuperate there. Or he may have meant that I had been right in the 1970s when I wanted to buy a house in Honolulu. I preferred at the time to think the former but the past tense suggested the latter. He said these things in the taxi between Beth Israel North and our apartment either three hours before he died or twenty-seven hours before he died, I try to remember which and cannot.

7.
    W hy did I keep stressing what was and was not normal, when nothing about it was?
    Let me try a chronology here.
    Quintana was admitted to the ICU at Beth Israel North on December 25, 2003.
    John died on December 30, 2003.
    I told Quintana that he was dead late on the morning of January 15, 2004, in the ICU at Beth Israel North, after the doctors had managed to remove the breathing tube and reduce sedation to a point at which she could gradually wake up. Telling her that day had not been the plan. The doctors had said that she would wake only intermittently, at first partially, and for a matter of days be able to absorb only limited information. If she woke and saw me she would wonder where her father was. Gerry and Tony and I had discussed this problem at length. We had decided that only Gerry should be with her when she first began to wake. She could focus on him, on their life together. The question of her father might not come up. I could see her later, maybe days later. I could tell her then. She would be stronger.
    As planned, Gerry was with her when she first woke. As not planned, a nurse told her that her mother was outside in the corridor.
    Then when is she coming in, she wanted to know.
    I went in.
    “Where’s Dad,” she whispered when she saw me.
    Because three weeks of intubation had inflamed her vocal cords, even her whisper was