The Year of Magical Thinking

"Information is control."

"One think I noticed during the course of those weeks at UCLA was that many people I knew, whether in New York or in California or in other places, shared a habit of mind usually credited to the very successful. They believed absolutely in their own management skills. They believed absolutely in the power of the telephone number they had at their fingertips, the right doctor, the major donor, the person who could facilitate a favor at State or Justice…. I had myself for most of my life shared the same core belief in my ability to control events…. Yet I had always at some level apprehended, because I was born fearful, that some events in life would remain beyond my ability to control or manage them. Some events would just happen. This was one of those events. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.  

Many people to whom I spoke in those first days while Quintana lay unconscious at UCLA seemed free of this apprehension. Their initial instinct was that this event could be managed. In order to manage it they needed other information. They needed only to know how this had happened. They needed answers. They needed 'the prognosis.'

I had no answers.
I had no prognosis.
I did not know how this had happened."

These quotes come from Joan Didion’s book The Year of Magical Thinking, which she wrote after her husband’s sudden death and while her daughter, Quintana, was hospitalized for months both in New York and in LA.

Now, I am not Joan Didion. I don’t have friends in high places who can facilitate favors at State or Justice, and I don’t categorize myself as the very successful. But I understand how the people she’s talking about think, and I find myself thinking like that too.

Until my dad’s disability happened, when I was fourteen, I thought that if I just did things right I could control or manage any event that came my way. Maybe I thought that even longer – I don’t think that at fourteen I really understood what had happened to my dad, and that it couldn’t just be fixed by finding the right doctor or the right procedure.

Maybe it didn’t even hit me, I mean really become a reality, until my mom was in the hospital. Until the surgeon came out from surgery and told us she might never really wake up. It wasn’t until then that I realized that I was truly out of control.

And even after that moment with the surgeon I wanted information. I wanted to know all the details, to learn as much as I could about my mom’s surgery, and about what tests they were running, and about the cancer. I wanted to know if she had a seizure, and why the seizure happened, and what medications they were going to put her on to prevent seizures in the future. I wanted to know everything (though I did stop myself for going on WebMD, which was probably a good idea), because knowing everything made me feel like I had a little bit of control.

Information is control. And I wanted all the information I could hold.

Even now I feel that same yen, that same need for information. It gives me a semblance of power in an out of control world.

But guess what? All the information in the world can’t tell me anything about what my mom is doing right now. And all the information in the world can’t tell me when this whole grief thing is going to be over, or when I can get back to normal, or what the word normal means, or how to keep going with all this sadness in tow.

I guess I’ll have to learn to embrace the mystery.