I revere writers and writing. Joan Didion. Aaron Sorkin. Joseph Conrad. I am trying to conjure a memory and with it a timeline. I was teaching, so it was before 2014. I would listen to NPR on the 35-minute drive to and from work. used to listen There was a tsunami in Japan. I looked it up. The “Japan Earthquake and Tsunami” happened on March 11, 2011. In the newsreel playing out in my memory, I learn about the devastation on my ride to work on or about March 11 or 12. As I looked for more bits to shore up my memory, I found a 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean – but that couldn’t be the one because I wasn’t teaching then. I remember listening to Joan Didion talking about her latest book(?) her daughter(?) the tsunami itself(?). I replay the sequence of events in the order that they must have taken place: driving and listening; hearing a particularly moving interview with an author whose name I recognize but whom I have not read; arriving at school knowing I must find the transcript of the interview and the urgency to share it with my students; reading the text my eyes well up, my voice catches in my throat and I break down; unable to continue I hand the transcript to a student to finish reading.
The story is about Didion’s husband dead as the two of them prepare to sit down to dinner. Just like that, in a singular moment, he is there and then he is gone. Some months later, Didion’s daughter died. And somewhere in the recounting, Joan Didion remembers an earlier earthquake, tsunami, flood, natural disaster, that her daughter immortalized in a child’s drawing. I have a very clear image of the child’s drawing, ovals representing the countless drowned and dead in a blue sea. I think that I remember the drawing being part of the transcript. Otherwise, how could I have such a clear picture. But my mind is playing tricks. The memories are like a deck of cards all in disarray. Not in a pack, not in a fan of a gin rummy hand, not lined up on the table in a solitaire. The memories are snippets caught on cardboard and flying in front of my eyes but not in order, not in any kind of sequence.
I spent a good part of the day yesterday trying to find traces of the interview. I search google and then in a more targeted search at NPR.org. Or was Didion on to talk about an article she had written, maybe for The New Yorker? I look there, too. And except that I am on my third or fourth computer, I don’t look for the saved pdf of the transcript. But I can see the paper with the columns and with the child’s drawing of ovals floating in a sea of death and destruction. I remember the direct way that I felt Didion’s words in my gut. How the words named a deep distress a deep melancholy a deep anguish at the loss of life. The loss of anonymous life up against the loss of deeply personal life of a husband and of a daughter one on top of the other. The rip and tear of one life into before and after.