The Year of Magical Thinking

by Joan Didion

This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself.

our days were filled with the sound of each other’s voices.

I needed to know how and why and when it had happened.

If I did not believe he was dead all along I would have thought I should have been able to save him.

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 subjective distress described as tension or mental pain.”

Yet I was myself in no way prepared to accept this news as final: there was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible.

occasions on which I was incapable of thinking rationally. I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome.

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

most frequent immediate responses to death were shock, numbness, and a sense of disbelief:

Because the reality of death has not yet penetrated awareness, survivors can appear to be quite accepting of the loss.”

“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.”

One situation in which pathological bereavement could occur, I read repeatedly, was that in which the survivor and the deceased had been unusually dependent on one another.

“I love you more than one more day,”

People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces.

The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness.

These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible.

I myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal. I seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead, entered a place in which I could be seen only by those who were themselves recently bereaved.

I wanted more than a night of memories and sighs.

I wanted to scream. I wanted him back.

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? Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant.

put away the plates and allowed myself to think for the first time about what would be required to restart my own life.

What would I give to be able to discuss anything at all with John? What would I give to be able to say one small thing that made him happy? What would that one small thing be? If I had said it in time would it have worked?

The clear light of day tells me that I did not allow John to die, that I did not have that power, but do I believe that?

Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed.

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

We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind.

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.

“A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty,”

Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone.

Yet on each occasion these pleas for his presence served only to reinforce my awareness of the final silence that separated us. Any answer he gave could exist only in my imagination, my edit.

we were equally incapable of imagining the reality of life without the other.

Marriage is memory, marriage is time.

Marriage is not only time: it is also, paradoxically, the denial of time. For forty years I saw myself through John’s eyes. I did not age.

Would I ever be right again? Could I ever again trust myself not to be wrong?

You’re safe. I’m here.

I had believed that we had that power.

a pledge that I would not lead the rest of my life as a special case, a guest, someone who could not function on her own.

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

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.

You had to go with the change.