Blue Nights



Providence, May 2011

"During the blue nights you think the end of day will never come. As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone."

The last book I read in 2011, a Christmas gift from my husband, was Joan Didion’s Blue Nights, a brief, quiet memoir that turned me inside out. Didion's daughter is gone now, and her husband, and her own health is fragile. She lives alone, her home no longer a nest but a closet full of mementoes, reminders of things she does not want to remember.

Reading the book, I thought of all the people I have lost, and how the words we summon to honor a person at death, no matter how honest or eloquent or incisive, no matter how Didionesque, are never adequate, never exactly right.  Some things cannot be contained in words.  Art, like life, like death, is never perfect. But, as evidenced by Blue Nights, the very act of reaching for words, putting words to paper, may be honor enough.