I thought she’d stay to see the flowers wilt. It was a trade and barter with time. If I bought flowers, she’d surely stay long enough to see the daisies fall with gravity and the petals crumble under the weight of dust settling. It was a noticeably similar habit in the way I ran from fear of my own death; by thinking I’d have to set an alarm clock to evade expiring in the middle of a nightmare. I’d have something scheduled to wake up to, to not miss, to have to attend or I risked the possibility of not waking from my slumber. In some regard, I expected my great aunt would live to see the flowers I bought her die before she did.
Instead, I watched as white clovers grew where she lay. Etched with wildlife sat a headstone wider than I. Marbled with natural browns and grays, it complimented the few others around it, blocking the breeze of the afternoon from rustling the crab weed. I perched myself between the stones intending to make note of something I hoped not to forget. Bold at the base of the stone were the words “may the work we’ve done speak for us.”
It seems fair to assume we all do things to enjoy the satisfaction of an ending. We risk quality for closure, for reaction, for reward. Maddening be those that encourage the idea of a journey rather than a destination simply because it challenges the idea of a goal. Though true that we should, in fact, be enjoying how we get there and with whom to live without resolve is not positively transient. Side effects may be dull, burnout, and overall apathetic. My own curiosity perplexes me. This is the story I’m allowing myself to believe.
It is the story I need to tell myself in order to keep my generalized idea of the human population afloat. Though so vastly different, I’ve come to notice in adulthood that we approach things like love, grief, emotion, and asking for help in similar ways. And I suppose that’s why there’s a “self-help” section of every bookstore you find yourself whispering in. In this instance, the story I am trying to tell myself is that grief can be all-encompassing and not at all cohesive. It is possible to experience and express grief in several different ways, all at the same time, and this I did not learn from my observation of the human condition. The rhetoric comes from learning through the stories of a presence I have just now lost.
When I had a mere dream of becoming a writer, I romanticized the idea of meeting Joan Didion. I excited myself at the idea of presenting myself to her, staring into her eyes and down the barrel of her own discourse, sure that she’d find me a phony, a fraud, a wanna-be, and I was. And I am. I dreamed of someday presenting her with an addition to her never-ending list of awards, straying from the notation that she was simply the reason why I had gotten to where I was (non-maladaptively, where I wanted to be). I dreamed of taking a moment to simply tell her what she had heard from thousands before, but I had never said myself. With the knowledge it would not have been different, I accepted that it would be enough to simply get it off my chest. This is the story I told myself.
The week of Christmas 2021, the story I told myself was that I was tired simply because I had not stopped moving for several weeks. The fact of the matter was not one I wanted to admit, and that was that my depression had become so bad I did not feel like my eyes were open. I did not feel like I was capable of feeling the lights of the season shine against the greens and browns of the eyes I inherited from my mother. My heart had been replaced with the stump of a tree: newly cut down with shards of itself scattered about. I sat in my room in only a towel listening to my sister string lights up in our hallway just a few nights before Christmas and felt like everything was moving in slow motion. Like I was wading through water and listening to music from beneath the surface. 600 lights finalized themselves against our peach-colored walls, bringing an ambiance to the hallway that felt more comfortable than uncomfortable, but still off-putting to my present self. This became disheartening. I had just finished talking about how much I loved Christmas lights when one night my best friend’s dad, from the front of the car, yelled “look Cheyenne! They still have Christmas lights out!” This was the January I went to Las Vegas, a year before I had first read Joan Didion. The person who, the same week we haphazardly strung Christmas lights throughout our upstairs hallway, had passed away from health complications.
I was not helpful the four hours following learning this news. I sat at my desk staring at my computer, thinking about how this is not what I wished for myself in my reverie. I thought about how I could not wait to get my fingers moving and doing something that I had not been able to make myself do in quite some time. I had woken up this particular morning with an overwhelming amount of skepticism. I knew something did not feel quite right, though I could not pinpoint it. I began thinking on the way home about all of this. How I had just been reminded days prior of Calvin Trillin, an author and man who, to a 90-pound Joan, suggested double her weight in congee when her husband, his former co-worker, passed unexpectedly. How all week I had experienced an echoing in my mind of the title of a collector’s edition of pieces she had written, entitled “we tell ourselves stories in order to live.” I pondered for four days what story I was telling myself. I could not stand to think that my soul knew something was about to – or had already – changed when I woke up this morning.
My bookshelves are donned with the work of Joan Didion. I tend to often think in her voice and narrate my own work with the same cadences that made me fall in love with hers. Though always having just been a figment of my own imagination, there was something that still felt so tangible, so like pixie dust she felt like Tinkerbell herself. Magical enough that I could see the sparkle fade. And while this feels like an overreaction to the mightiest degree, there truly feels like there is a piece missing, though the sentence had been finished. This woman has given me so much to assess about my own identity, I’m not certain I would have the frame of mind about myself had I not been given the opportunity to indulge in the endless amounts of her work she had available to those decades her youth. Her writing felt like a co-sign of my own.
She has plenty of work left that can, will, and does speak for her. I am leaving you with a piece of her that feels so overwhelmingly spot on for the moment. Rest in Peace.
“We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.”
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