The Year of Magical Thinking

by Joan Didion

Philippe Ariès, in The Hour of Our Death, points out that the essential characteristic of death as it appears in the Chanson de Roland is that the death, even if sudden or accidental, “gives advance warning of its arrival.”

One day when I was talking on the telephone in his office I mindlessly turned the pages of the dictionary that he had always left open on the table by the desk. When I realized what I had done I was stricken: what word had he last looked up, what had he been thinking? By turning the pages had I lost the message? Or had the message been lost before I touched the dictionary? Had I refused to hear the message? I tell you that I shall not live two days, Gawain said.

I open another issue of Daedalus, this one devoted to the concept of “happiness.” One piece on happiness, the joint work of Robert Biswas-Diener of the University of Oregon and Ed Diener and Maya Tamir of the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, noted that although “research has shown that people can adapt to a wide range of good and bad life events in less than two months,” there remained “some events to which people are slow or unable to adapt completely.” Unemployment was one such event. “We also find,” the authors added, “that it takes the average widow many years after her spouse’s death to regain her former level of life satisfaction.”

“More than one more day,” he had whispered to her before he walked her to the altar. “More than one more day,” he had whispered to her on the five days and nights he saw her in the Beth Israel North ICU. “More than one more day,” I had whispered to her in his absence on the days and nights that followed. As you used to say to me, she had said when she stood in her black dress at St. John the Divine on the day we committed his ashes.