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.

I was trying to work out what time it had been when he died and whether it was that time yet in Los Angeles. (Was there time to go back? Could we have a different ending on Pacific time?)

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. That was why I needed to be alone.

I needed to be alone so that he could come back. This was the beginning of my year of magical thinking.

When I saw the photograph I realized for the first time why the obituaries had so disturbed me. I had allowed other people to think he was dead. I had allowed him to be buried alive.

Why make this call and not just say what you wanted? His eyes. His blue eyes. His blue imperfect eyes.

People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness.

Do you think I’ll be okay in California, she said. I said yes. Definitely she would be okay in California. Going to California would in fact be the first day of the rest of her life.

The way you got sideswiped was by going back.

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. Until now there had been every urgent reason to obliterate any attention that might otherwise have been paid, banish the thought, bring fresh adrenaline to bear on the crisis of the day. I had passed an entire season during which the only words I allowed myself to truly hear were recorded: Wel-come to U-C-L-A.

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?

I did not believe in the resurrection of the body but I still believed that given the right circumstances he would come back. He who left the faint traces before he died, the Number Three pencil.

“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. In retrospect this had been my omen, my message, the early snowfall, the birthday present no one else could give me. He had twenty-five nights left to live.

How could I go back to Paris without him, how could I go back to Milan, Honolulu, Bogotá? I couldn’t even go to Boston.

I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response.

We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.

We are not idealized wild things. 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.

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.

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