For Masochists Only

For some reason my favourite novels deal with death: Joyce Johnson's In the Night Café (the movie starred me and a much younger Robert Redford; in real life it was me with my late boyfriend David), Anne Patchett's lovely The Magician's Assistant, which I read lying in bed next to David--him annoyed that I had lost myself in a book that he himself had given me. Ignoring the flesh for the word. Dreaming of life in print. While death in print is but a prod. A prod to memory but also an electric prod. Manna for masochists.
Which makes none of these an easy read much less a comfort, unless that comfort lies in knowing someone else suffers just as much, even the rich, especially the rich. They may have their money but they're not exempt. Pain is never personal though it sure feels that way.
I remember when John Kennedy Jr. died, the televised days they searched for his plane. (It was after David died; Princess Diana's death was the bracket before.) Carole Radziwill's book is a personal story about John Kennedy's death: Radziwill was married to his cousin, Anthony, and best friends with his wife, Carolyn  Bessette. Her husband was dying of cancer when the couple went missing.
"I had prepared for an approaching sorrow, but not, as it turned out, for the one that was nearest."
That awful moment when you think things can't possibly get worse. And then they do.
The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights by Joan Didion is the prose of  a  beloved's angst. Didion's husband had a bad heart and had been through surgery when their daughter was mysteriously struck down; still, neither was expected to die, both did.
"John was talking, then he wasn't."
'Magical'  thinking is the only way to carry on, an elaborate form of denial, keeping his shoes in case he returned.
Blue Nights, which details the death of her daughter, Quintana, is overwhelming in its sadness. The reader knows the ending from the beginning: it is the exact opposite of Quintana's philosophy, "Like when someone dies, don't dwell on it."  As a mother and writer, Didion can do little else.
Say Her Name has more a desperate, violent edge to it. Goldman lost his young wife in a freak accident, one that he takes blame for, one that he replays over and over and over again. This book may be a purgative but it is definitely not a curative; the pain in print is too pervasive to ever disappear. But it does keep her name alive, not said but howled.
So read it and weep.

What more could you want than a dog, a book and a blog?