It rained in Los Angeles on the day that Joan Didion died, and it rained again, almost exactly one year later, when I went to see Joan Didion: What She Means at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. The exhibit, curated by New Yorker writer Hilton Als, will be at the Hammer until February 19 before migrating to the Pérez Art Museum in Miami in July.
Didion died in New York on December 23, 2021, but I like to imagine that, had her deathbed been in Southern California, she would’ve found the morning’s blustery rainfall peaceful and necessary. She wanted to be rain, so deep was her self-professed “reverence for water”: “I wanted to be the one, that day, who was shining the olives, filling the gardens, and flooding the daylong valleys like the Nile,” concluded Didion in her 1977 essay “Holy Water.”
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