The Year of Magical Thinking

by Joan Didion

The Hour of Our Death,

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.

1942 Cocoanut Grove fire,

“sensations of somatic distress occurring in waves lasting from twenty minutes to an hour

at a time, a feeling of tightness in the throat, choking with shortness of breath, need for sighing, and an empty feeling in the abdomen, lack of muscular power, and an intense subject...

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. One of several lines from different poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins

I should say that in mourning the subject goes through a modified and transitory manic-depressive state and overcomes it.”

through the winter and spring there had been occasions on which I was incapable of thinking rationally.

and what i want to know is

how do you like your blueeyed boy Mister Death

1) What is the meaning of the poem and what is the experience? 2) What thought or reflection does the experience lead us to? 3) What mood, feeling, emotion is stirred or created by the poem as a whole?

No one should ever be forced upon those in grief, and all over-emotional people, no matter how near or dear, should be barred absolutely.

Everything’s going along as usual and then all shit breaks loose.

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.

Yet having seen the picture in no way deflected, when it came, the swift empty loss of the actual event.

There came a time in the summer when I began feeling fragile, unstable.

“I just can’t see the upside in this,”

“That’s not what I meant at all,” John said. “I knew what he meant,” Susan said. Had I understood nothing?

We all die.

For once in your life just let it go.

“More than one more day,”

I said I knew what John meant when he said we were not having any fun.

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 learned that I could find it in geology, so I did. This in turn enabled me to find meaning in the Episcopal litany, most acutely in the words

as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end,

which I interpreted as a literal description of the constant changing of the earth, the unending erosion of the shores and mountains, the inexorable shifting of the geological structures that could throw up mountains and islands and could just as reliably take them away. I found earthquakes, even when I wa...

These fragments I have shored against my ruins,

T. S. Eliot 'The Wasteland '

The question of self-pity.

“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.”

“Our worst enemy,” Helen Keller called it. I never saw a wild thing / sorry for itself, D. H. Lawrence wrote,

A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough / without ever having felt sorry for itself.

“I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense,” C. S. Lewis wrote after the death of his wife. “It comes from the frustration of so

many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought, feeling after feeling, action after action, had H. for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an arrow to the string, then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead thought to H. I set out on one of them. But now there’s an impassable frontierpost across it. So many roads once; now so many cul de sacs.”

Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving? and It is the blight man was born for, / It is Margaret you mourn for.

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.

Time is the school in which we learn, / Time is the fire in which we burn: Delmore Schwartz again.

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.