Engulfed By Grief

Popova highlights a passage from Joan Didion’s 2005 memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, written after the death of her husband of 40 years:

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect the shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes.

In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be “healing.” A certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days. We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place. When we anticipate the funeral we wonder about failing to “get through it,” rise to the occasion, exhibit the “strength” that invariably gets mentioned as the correct response to death. We anticipate needing to steel ourselves for the moment: will I be able to greet people, will I be able to leave the scene, will I be able even to get dressed that day? We have no way of knowing that this will not be the issue. We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.

Update from a reader:

I know that a lot of people, widowed especially, identify with Didion’s magical thinking perspective where grief is concerned, but it’s dangerous at worst and simply unhelpful at the least to assume that grief shares more than just a handful of touchstones for everyone. I couldn’t read her book. It didn’t resonate with my experience as far as losing a spouse went. I never thought my husband would show up one day and wonder why I’d taken over the closet. I never mourned our lost future because he’d succumbed to a terminal diagnosis and I’d put away our future long before he died.

And I always moved forward because it was the only route I knew that would ensure my survival. I didn’t have time to be crazy. I had a toddler, a full time job and a life that I couldn’t outsource.

There were dark days and angry ones and days when I was just so tired of it all that I cursed my husband out for leaving me stuck to deal with it while he bounced around on clouds without a care, but I laughed too. Found joy. Started dating and before the first year had passed met the guy who is now my husband.

Yeah, it sucks, but it’s not forever in the bottomless-pit way Didion would have us believe. We don’t all lose our minds.

(Photo by Ibai Acevedo)