The Year of Magical Thinking

by Joan Didion

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

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

The death of a parent, he wrote, “despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago. We might, in that indeterminate period they call mourning, be in a submarine, silent on the ocean’s bed, aware of the depth charges, now near and now far, buffeting us with recollections.”

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.

there was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible.

In time of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control.

In both England and the United States, he observed, the contemporary trend was “to treat mourning as morbid self-indulgence, and to give social admiration to the bereaved who hide their grief so fully that no one would guess anything had happened.”

I realized that the answer to the question made no difference. It had happened.

I did not believe in the resurrection of the body but I still believed that given the right circumstances he would come back.

Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed. They remember the tree that died, the gull that splattered onto the hood of the car.

I had not sufficiently appreciated it, a persistent theme by that stage of whatever I was going through.

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

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.

I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response.

As I recall this I realize how open we are to the persistent message that we can avert death. And to its punitive correlative, the message that if death catches us we have only ourselves to blame.

It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.

Did he know how few hours there were, did he feel himself going, was he saying that he did not want to leave?

The craziness is receding but no clarity is taking its place. I look for resolution and find none.