The Year of Unfortunate Coincidences.

Four years ago Joan Didion wrote what I consider to be the ultimate handbook on grieving, The Year of Magical Thinking. For those of you who haven’t read the book, Didion’s husband, the writer John Dunne, had a massive heart attack at the dinner table one December night in 2003 and died instantly. The literary couple had just returned from visiting their only daughter, Quintana Roo, as she lay in the hospital in a coma—a result of a case of pneumonia that turned into septic shock that turned into bleeding in her brain.

A year and a half later Quintana Roo died of complications from the whole ordeal—two months before The Year of Magical Thinking was published. She was just 39 years old. The book is essentially a diary of the first year in the life of Didion as a widow, and it is breathtaking. (Didion finished the book in December 2004 and did not go back and revise the manuscript to reflect her daughter’s passing in August 2005. The book came out in October of that year.)

I am thinking about Joan Didion today as I hear the unfolding news about actress Natasha Richardson, who now lies in a coma with a bleeding brain. Her mother, Vanessa Redgrave, portrayed Didion in the one-woman play The Year Of Magical Thinking, when it was adapted to the stage in 2007. And now, it appears that just like Didion, Redgrave will lose her young daughter to a similar freak thing.  Life is in many ways imitating art, here, and it’s just devastating. I am wondering if Didion and Redgrave are close. If they are, I am sure Didion is preparing a vat of chicken broth for Redgrave right now, for as she noted in her book “grieving people will not ask for food, but they will instinctively take it if it is put in front of them.”

My thoughts are with both of them right now.