The Year of Magical Thinking

by Joan Didion

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.

We walked every morning. We did not always walk together because we liked different routes but we would keep the other’s route in mind and intersect before we left the park.

“Research to date has shown that, like many other stressors, grief frequently leads to changes in the endocrine, immune, autonomic nervous, and cardiovascular systems; all of these are fundamentally influenced by brain function and neurotransmitters.”

Why, if those were my images of death, did I remain so unable to accept the fact that he had died? Was it because I was failing to understand it as something that had happened to him? Was it because I was still understanding it as something that had happened to me?

The way you got sideswiped was by going back.

I had grown used to watching her brain waves. It was a way of hearing her talk.

She was reaching a point at which she would need once again to be, if she was to recover, on her own. I determined to spend the summer reaching the same point.

Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

“Goddamn,” John said to me when he closed the book. “Don’t ever tell me again you can’t write. That’s my birthday present to you.” I remember tears coming to my eyes. I feel them now.

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

“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.”

Time is the school in which we learn.

Leis go brown, tectonic plates shift, deep currents move, islands vanish, rooms get forgotten.