Free The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion Page A

barely audible. I told her what had happened. I stressed the history of cardiac problems, the long run of luck that had finally caught up with us, the apparent suddenness but actual inevitability of the event. She cried. Gerry and I each held her. She dropped back into sleep.
    “How’s Dad,” she whispered when I saw her that evening.
    I began again. The heart attack. The history. The apparent suddenness of the event.
    “But how is he
now,
” she whispered, straining to be audible.
    She had absorbed the sudden event part but not the outcome.
    I told her again. In the end I would have to tell her a third time, in another ICU, this one at UCLA.
    The chronology.
    On January 19, 2004, she was moved from the sixth-floor ICU at Beth Israel North to a room on the twelfth floor. On January 22, 2004, still too weak to stand or sit unsupported and running a fever from a hospital infection acquired in the ICU, she was discharged from Beth Israel North. Gerry and I put her to bed in her old room in my apartment. Gerry went out to fill the prescriptions she had been given. She got out of bed to get another quilt from the closet and collapsed on the floor. I could not lift her and needed to get someone from the building to put her back to bed.
    On the morning of January 25, 2004, she woke, still in my apartment, with severe chest pain and increasing fever. She was admitted that day to the Milstein Hospital at Columbia-Presbyterian after a diagnosis of pulmonary emboli was reached in the Presbyterian emergency room. Given her prolonged immobility at Beth Israel, I know now but did not know then, this was an entirely predictable development that could have been diagnosed before discharge from Beth Israel by the same imaging that was done three days later in the Presbyterian emergency room. After she was admitted to Milstein her legs were imaged to see if further clots had formed. She was placed on anticoagulants to prevent such further formation while the existing clots were allowed to dissolve.
    On February 3, 2004, she was discharged from Presbyterian, still on anticoagulants. She began physical therapy to regain strength and mobility. Together, with Tony and Nick, she and I planned the service for John. The service took place at four o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon, March 23, 2004, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where, at three o’clock in the presence of the family, John’s ashes had been placed as planned in the chapel off the main altar. After the service Nick had arranged a reception at the Union Club. Eventually thirty or forty members of the family made their way back to John’s and my apartment. I lit a fire. We had drinks. We had dinner. Quintana, although still fragile, had stood up in her black dress at the Cathedral and laughed with her cousins at dinner. On the morning of March 25, a day and a half later, she and Gerry were going to restart their life by flying to California and walking on the beach at Malibu for a few days. I had encouraged this. I wanted to see Malibu color on her face and hair again.
    The next day, March 24, alone in the apartment, the obligation to bury my husband and see our daughter through her crisis formally fulfilled, I put away the plates and allowed myself to think for the first time about what would be required to restart my own life. I called Quintana to wish her a good trip. She was flying early the next morning. She sounded anxious. She was always anxious before a trip. Decisions about what to pack had seemed since childhood to trigger some fear of lost organization. Do you think I’ll be okay in California, she said. I said yes. Definitely she would be okay in California. Going to California would in fact be the first day of the rest of her life. It occurred to me as I hung up that cleaning my office could be a step toward the first day of the rest of my own life. I began doing this. During most of the following day, Thursday, March 25, I continued doing this. At points