Magical thinking a common response to sorrow

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This article was published 08/04/2024 (830 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In her 2005 memoir The Year of Magical Thinking — the theatrical adaptation of which opens at Prairie Theatre Exchange on Wednesday — Joan Didion writes movingly about losing her husband. Though his death had been expected, insofar as his “bad heart” made him a prime “candidate for a catastrophic coronary event,” the attack that took him came as sudden, impossible to believe as true, as final.

Poignant, paradoxical realities followed. Didion appeared to accept his death as irreversible, even as her magical thinking, her magic tricks, bartered for reversal: in the midst of giving his clothes away she held on to a pair of his shoes in case he were to “return”; she authorized an autopsy while reasoning that some simple adjustment could be made to “fix” his heart.

Magical thinking has relevance to my own experience of loss during the many years of a chronic illness that led to my husband’s death at 68. We were young at 43 (me) and 45 (Mendel) when the diagnosis took hold. The hope of remission unrealized, we braved (endured) the disease’s relentless assault managed through diverse treatments both life-prolonging and life-diminishing: a failed first kidney transplant, dialysis and drug therapies, hospitalizations and surgeries, the cast of co-morbidities Mendel recorded in a little black book always within reach.

At the end of his tether, risking a second transplant, even within that difficult and unwinnable battle, he remained devoted to the battle cry of his own making that had thus far sustained him: “Not yet.”

His magical thinking? I did not ask. His struggle resided in his great heart, his unerring sense of the odds against him, an unremitting ingenuity dedicated to how he and others might live longer.

When the diagnosis was new, I went in search of a house with thicker walls, a moat, a drawbridge — a house so formidable it might stymie the disease’s advance. I looked, though I knew this house did not exist. At an information session, I wore oversized sunglasses, thinking they would hide my grief, though the shades only emphasized my exposure at a table with withered patients and partners seated under fluorescent lights.

When tear-stained and angry, broken further by more bad news, I beseeched Mendel’s dead mother to broker her son’s remission, thinking: Hadn’t her family suffered the agonies of the Holocaust? Couldn’t she negotiate a pass for her son? I bargained, knowing fairer trade within the domains of chronic, incurable and catastrophe impossible.

When Mendel died, caught between belief and disbelief, I continued my devotion to magical thinking even as I dismissed the dreaming that bred it. In the midst of death’s necessary finality, I conducted the search for signs and wonders that might portend otherwise.

A black bird on the front porch railing? An eagle and hawk circling together over the lake? A licence plate with Mendel’s initials in front of me at a crosswalk? A near miss in a parking lot that left my ancient Honda Fit with a single scratch and the other car intact?

I burned incense and candles, feeling that if I did not do so every day, I would diminish Mendel’s chances of returning; did so even though his ashes sat in a small, lidded basket beside incense and candle, beside the picture of him, bursting with well-being, before the disease announced itself.

Part of me accepted the pattern of life and death as vital to the cosmos ongoing; the other part figured Mendel might have been awarded an exemption because … he was such a good one, so in love with life, incredibly adaptive, wishing even in his last moments that he might meet another grandchild, attend his eldest son’s wedding.

I wonder how many of us have sat beside these moments as those dying wished for just a little more time. Though the end might come with relief from pain, death’s inevitability torments those left behind.

During Mendel’s illness and after his death, when friends consoled by saying anyone could be hit by a bus and thus extinguished, I had no magic tricks that could transform that into consolation. When friends said Mendel was in a better place, I could not imagine anything better than the bit of paradise given to humans as life on earth.

What could possibly be better than nature, our sons, a dwelling place spun with love amid adversity?

I know Mendel lived longer than most and made meaning for himself and others despite and through the limits illness imposed. I know that my magical thinking lives in the fraught space between denial and desire.

Tethered to the reality of Mendel’s death, I am equally tethered to an ongoing interest in meaning making, to the immeasurable mysteries that sustain us, however we name them, that call the garden from fallow, the child toward wonder and love as a life’s work in all its manifestations.

Winnipeg writer Deborah Schnitzer explores life lessons from women in their Third Act.