The Year of Magical Thinking

by Joan Didion

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.

Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.

Self-pity remains both the most common and the most universally reviled of our character defects, its pestilential destructiveness accepted as given.

In fact the grieving have urgent reasons, even an urgent need, to feel sorry for themselves.

I am dropping my keys on the table inside the door before I fully remember. There is no one to hear this news, nowhere to go with the unmade plan, the uncompleted thought. There is no one to agree, disagree, talk back.

We are not idealized wild things. We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.