Part 1
It’s her hands. I can’t take my eyes off her hands, flittering around her body, independent perhaps, even of intention. Elbows and arms fly, hands attached with wings. Like bats emerging at sunset, they search for answers. In close-ups, she's all sinew, bones, tendons and veins so close to the surface, her flesh shrinking.
I try not to imagine her naked, as naked as a life model I once drew, who was so thin that his buttocks didn’t have enough flesh to cover his anus, as if he’d just walked out from Dachau, his body a lesson in anatomy.
Joan is so tiny, but her words aren’t.
Almost anyone who grew up in Sacramento back then knew someone from the Didion family. It was big and extended. I grew up on 4th Avenue, between Freeport and 22nd. A cousin, Marilyn, lived on the north side of 4th, closer to Freeport. I don’t know why I remember her. We must have walked to school together, back when children were safer. I know another Didion, a terrific ceramic artist, the kind of person who looks deeply into your eyes like you’re the most important person in her world. I don’t know why we’re not better friends; maybe because she’s always so close, so enthusiastic.
Joan writes about family. Joan writes about death.
Death of her husband. I can’t read it.
Death of her daughter. I can’t read it.
She had a life-long partnership with her husband, often rocky, mostly productive. They worked together, edited together, even when disclosing impossibly intimate frustrations between them. “This is gold,” she said, when recounting a story about a small child on acid in the 70s. That is what they did, their mission, they’d agreed, to write about anything and everything.
I’d like to do that.
Part 2
By contrast, I come from a small family. My mother was an only, my father, one of two. His sister had no children. The closest living relative I have is a third cousin.
As an only child, I search for sole-mate-siblings. One is a woman I’d known for thirty years. In the following, though her name was Cathy, I address her direct, as if she was still alive. Because that’s how we communicated – by email, across the distance between Sacramento and her newest town, Austin.
This is the start of that dialogue.
You became a close friend in the first 5 minutes of our meeting, so many years ago. We met at a party, sat on the couch discussing an adventure that we never got around to, inseparable from then on. I admired your brilliant mind, your sense of humor. I saw you through a few boyfriends, laughed at your story of a candle that caught your bed on fire during one such encounter, quickly snuffed.
We had so many seriously great laughs. You were the person I called when I started a love affair, recounting salacious scenes for our mutual amusement, laughing hilariously at each antic. We traveled, and upon occasion, I endured your bossiness past the point of annoyance. I watched you fall in love with a lovely man 18 years your senior. Helped you through a career crisis, endure whistleblower retaliation, get driven out of your job. Watched you move to Nantucket and discover a melanoma in your eye and then move again. Your last move as a celebrated museum director.
You were the person who rescued and sheltered me when my marriage exploded, during a period when my husband had transformed into a stranger who looked remarkably like a monster. Your house was my refuge, not only in panics, but on lovely Sunday mornings for breakfast, or evenings for gin and tonics and salmon smoked to perfection.
Our friendship almost died at one point, in the midst of your professional siege, when you became obsessed to the point of disorder. Not that I blamed you. You couldn’t put your phone down, constantly calling and texting the same content over and over to a select few friends. I wanted to throw your phone out the window. I wanted to throw you out the window: the repetitive verbal vomiting that had become intolerable. Did stress, and your inability to relieve it, cause your illness?
You face unspeakable challenges. Spots in your liver, spots on your lung.
From your hospital bed, you told me not to be “one of those people who pats you on the head and says everything’s going to be all right.” I shouldn’t be doomsday, that there must be some place in between. OK, I say. I’ll be the in-between.
You had sisters, a large extended family and many friends, and you’ve asked me to write your obituary. I had to watch the “Obit,” the New York Times documentary on the obituary writers to try to learn how to do it. Over and over.
I suggested you start writing as a way to channel fear and purpose, a method that can be rewarding, somehow. That writing everything, writing without thinking, without censuring, is a way to follow a path through a labyrinth, that sometimes that path finds a tiny space, and that within that place, something might be discovered.
And then I thought: we should start a dialogue between us. Back and forth.
A dialogue about dying.
This was the start of that dialogue.
I had hoped it would have continued for many years.