The Year of Magical Thinking

by Joan Didion

Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity.

In the midst of life we are in death,

I waited. The room was cold, or I was. I wondered how much time had passed

“It’s okay,” the social worker said. “She’s a pretty cool customer.”

“Do you have money for the fare,” he asked. I said I did, the cool customer.

I wondered what an uncool customer would be allowed to do. Break down? Require sedation? Scream?

I remember thinking that I needed to discuss this with John. There was nothing I did not discuss with John.

ouch

I did not always think he was right nor did he always think I was right but we were each the person the other trusted.

so determined to avoid any inappropriate response (tears, anger, helpless laughter at the Oz-like hush) that I had shut down all response.

I needed to know how and why and when it had happened. In fact I wanted to be in the room when they did it (I had watched those other autopsies with John, I owed him his own, it was fixed in my mind at that moment that he would be in the room if I were on the table) but I did not trust myself to rationally present the point so I did not ask.

Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be.

Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of “waves.”

how could I deal at this moment with company?

The clothes on this shelf were as familiar to me as my own.

How could he come back if they took his organs, how could he come back if he had no shoes?

By late summer I was beginning to see this clearly. “Seeing it clearly” did not yet allow me to give away the clothes he would need.

Information was control.

five letters, “waste.” Was that what we had done? Was that what he thought we had done? Why didn’t I listen when he said we weren’t having any fun? Why didn’t I move to change our life?

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.

People in grief think a great deal about self-pity. We worry it, dread it, scourge our thinking for signs of it. We fear that our actions will reveal the condition tellingly described as “dwelling on it.” We understand the aversion most of us have to “dwelling on it.” Visible mourning reminds us of death, which is construed as unnatural, a failure to manage the situation. “A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty,” Philippe Ariès wrote to the point of this aversion in Western Attitudes toward Death. “But one no longer has the right to say so aloud.”

The very language we use when we think about self-pity betrays the deep abhorrence in which we hold it: self-pity is feeling sorry for yourself, self-pity is thumb-sucking, self-pity is boo hoo poor me, self-pity is the condition in which those feeling sorry for themselves indulge, or even wallow. Self-pity remains both the most common and the most universally reviled of our character defects, its pestilential destructiveness accepted as given. “Our worst enemy,” Helen Keller called it.

I am dropping my keys on the table inside the door before I fully remember. There is no one to hear this news,

I asked John point blank what to do. I said I needed his help. I said I could not do this alone. I said these things out loud, actually vocalized the words.

I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing. Yet on each occasion these pleas for his presence served only to reinforce my awareness of the final silence that separated us. Any answer he gave could exist only in my imagination, my edit. For me to imagine what he could say only in my edit would seem obscene, a violation.