Through the Eyes of Others

About six months ago, I read Joan Didion's book The Year of Magical Thinking - it's an extraordinary account, an account of grief, grief in the face of the death of a beloved spouse. I did not realize that in reading that book I would not come away unscathed - it is a book that burns, burns because it is both so extraordinary - how many significant writers can you think of who have spent an entire book describing such a grief? - and so ordinary - will not all of us, at some point, face the horror of the death of someone dear to us? Since I read it, I feel in some ways, I'll never really be the same - there's a kind of knowledge that changes you, and Didion has that dangerous giftedness that all eminent writers do to get inside you, inside your experience of life.

As we've been talking about perception this quarter - how we perceive, why we perceive in the way we do, how we perceive others, how and why we don't perceive others - and I realize that much of my own perception of the world is shaped in significant ways by books. Certain books, not all books. Didion's book has forever changed my perception others of who are grieving, my perception of death, my perception of myself and others as a mortal beings, and my perception of my connectedness to those closest to me.

One thing that Didion wrote has particularly haunted me - she writes, "Marriage is memory, marriage is time. . . . Marriage is not only time: it is also paradoxically, the denial of time. For forty years I saw myself through John's eyes. I did not age. This year [the year of John's death] for the first time since I was twenty-nine I saw myself through the eyes of others. This year for the first time since I was twenty-nine I realized that my image of myself was of someone significantly younger" (197). Is this not an observation almost that cannot be tolerated? (And yet, I revel in the despairing truth of it. Isn't this the joy and pain of great writing?) We do not realize, I think, how much the eyes of others, particularly of those closest to us, affect our perception of ourselves - and if we are with a dear other for years upon years, is it not inevitable that that "other" vision becomes so much a part of who we are that if it is torn away, the shock of it, the abrupt awareness of new eyes looking at us, might be too much to bear?

When my grandmother died after 55 years of marriage to my grandfather, my grandfather at once became much older. I noted it then, but could not really make sense of it. He became a different person. I cannot say for certain that his dementia and the rapidity of his physical aging was a direct result of my grandmother's death, but saying that it was, at least in part, makes a great deal of sense to me. Without her vision of him, he, in some way, lost himself, I think. I do not mean to be so grim here, but I feel I must respond to Didion's book in some way, for it touches us all so nearly. Her book - with this insight into death, and grief, and into how the lives of others are so intertwined with our own - is a gift - a terrible one perhaps, but nonetheless, a gift.