by Ellen Acconcia

Dec. 13, 2003. I sit down to breakfast with my youngest daughter, my mother and my husband. Minutes after running outside for a check of our Christmas lights, my husband returns and collapses in the family room from what I’d later learn was sudden cardiac arrest, the ‘widowmaker.’ We’d just celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary during the prior month.

My husband’s skin is clammy, he is taking rasping breaths. I scream into the telephone at the 911 dispatcher, “When are they coming?” The EMTs finally burst through the front door, boots pound across the kitchen. They shove me out of the way, intent on their work, thrusting the heavy furniture across the hardwood floor.

I watch at a distance, my elbows on the kitchen island. The room is a whirlpool as the medics move purposefully and do things with scary equipment. The sheriff arrives and pulls me aside suggesting I take my 14-year-old daughter upstairs. My elderly mother weeps in her bedroom.

***

Later, at the hospital I’m left alone in a tiny, windowless room off the ER. It’s a bland, square, sparsely furnished space hung with nondescript art. I think, this is where they put people—people like me—who are waiting for bad news. I spot a wooden cross on one of the walls. It concerns me.

***

On the evening of Dec. 30, 2003, the writers John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion returned from the hospital after visiting their seriously ill daughter, Quintana Roo. Their quiet supper by the fireplace in their cozy, well-appointed Upper West Side apartment is interrupted as Dunne slumps in his chair and dies.

“You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends,” writes Didion in her memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, an unfiltered, somewhat spare of emotion, account of the year following Dunne’s sudden death. She describes, “the unexpected collapse, with the arrival of an E.M.T. team, transforming everything with a sudden overthrow.” At the time of its publication in 2005, my emotional state was too raw to tackle Didion’s memoir; I was afraid to learn how closely it mirrored my own experience. Now, 20 years on from my own trauma, I pick it up and experience our shared grief.

***

I’m struck that Didion seems serene, the atmosphere in the apartment hushed. Dunne is, no question, near death or already dead. She systematically contemplates what must be done next, for example, trying to recall specific paperwork that will be needed. Should she call someone right away? She worries about incidentals like banking the fire.

As I wait in silence at the hospital, I also begin a plan—how we’ll get through a difficult convalescence; the ways we’ll manage if my husband is no longer able to work. But deep down, the heavy feeling building in my stomach tells me that soon the doctor will come in and say—just like on TV—I’m sorry, we did all we could.

I’m numb when I get home. I’m numb when my older daughter arrives from college and when my younger daughter retreats to her room and never cries. Everything seems muted, distorted. My thoughts are fuzzy as though the world is wrapped in cotton wool. Always a planner, I find online Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief and memorize them. I think, ‘I’ll need a compass to know where I am in this later.’

***

While Kubler-Ross’s framework often follows a prescribed course, Kubler-Ross herself said that the stages were never meant to be taken as a set of chronological steps. That said, both Didion and I move into stage one—“denial”—quickly.

In the wake of Dunne’s death, Didion finds herself unable to accept her loss. “Magical thinking,” she says, is the use of mind tricks to deflect the pain of her grief. For a long time, she refuses to donate Dunne’s clothing, seeing that as an affirmation that he is not coming back.

I find myself wandering the supermarket, expecting to see my husband in the next aisle. I drive home from work anxiously scanning each car that pulls up next to me thinking—as I crane my neck for a better look through the window—that he’ll be driver or passenger. I know it’s insane, but I can’t stop.  What would I say to him if he appeared in the dairy section, “I thought you were dead?”

***

“Grief when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be,” writes Didion. Reading her memoir now, decades on from each of our tragic winters seems appropriate. When I was a child in New York City, December meant stars and bells magically created from Edison bulbs strung across the avenue. When my children were small, December brought with it an endless schedule of school concerts and last-minute wrapping. Now each December awakens an almost imperceptible dull ache in my chest. Memory—it’s a blessing and a curse.

***

Didion says she knows why we keep the dead alive, it’s to keep them with us. When I gather with my daughters in the years since their father’s death, I am careful to conjure him often, “Oh, Dad just loved the 4th of July … remember?” or “Remember when Dad used to get excited each Christmas about the ‘family gift?’”

***

I find some boxes stacked in the guest room closet after a move, filled with envelopes of photos and memorabilia: family pictures that belonged to my mother, a handwritten family tree from a cousin, kids’ saved artwork and school essays; a box of my late husband’s photos, military and government awards, and service records.

I spend a long time combing through the box, holding the small trophies, medallions and keepsakes, reading letters of congratulations, running my fingers over the embroidery on patches. I scan formal group and handshake photos to see my long-ago husband.

I carefully place everything in a box and label it for my daughters to find and keep when I, too, am gone.

Image by Simon via Pexels