The Year of Magical Thinking

by Joan Didion

She wrote in a world in which mourning was still recognized, allowed, not hidden from view.

You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

In a heartbeat. Or the absence of one.

“I love you more than one more day,” Quintana said three months later standing in the black dress at St. John the Divine. “As you used to say to me.”

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?

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.

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

So many roads once; now so many cul de sacs.”

“you can love more than one person.” Of course you can, but marriage is something different. Marriage is memory, marriage is time.

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.

I had promised her that we would not let the Broken Man catch her. You’re safe. I’m here. I had believed that we had that power.

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.