The Year of Magical Thinking

by Joan Didion

In the midst of life we are in death,

This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning.

I remember thinking that I needed to discuss this with John.

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.” Gawain is asked: “Ah, good my lord, think you then so soon to die?” Gawain answers: “I tell you that I shall not live two days.” Ariès notes: “Neither his doctor nor his friends nor the priests (the latter are absent and forgotten) know as much about it as he. Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.”

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. Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of “waves.”

(Was there time to go back? Could we have a different ending on Pacific time?)

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.

Were we unusually dependent on one another the summer we swam and watched Tenko and went to dinner at Morton’s? Or were we unusually lucky?

In both England and the United States, he observed, the contemporary trend was “to treat mourning as morbid self-indulgence, and to give social admiration to the bereaved who hide their grief so fully that no one would guess anything had happened.”

“More than one more day,” he had whispered, another part of our family shorthand. The reference was to a line from a movie, Richard Lester’s Robin and Marian. “I love you more than even one more day,” Audrey Hepburn as Maid Marian says to Sean Connery as Robin Hood after she has given them both the fatal potion. John had whispered this every time he left the ICU.

How far had I absented myself from the world of normal response?

On takeoff he held my hand until the plane began leveling. He always did. Where did that go?

Yet I had always at some level apprehended, because I was born fearful, that some events in life would remain beyond my ability to control or manage them. Some events would just happen. This was one of those events. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

The way you got sideswiped was by going back.

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?

If the dead were truly to come back, what would they come back knowing? Could we face them? We who allowed them to die? 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? Does he?

I had not sufficiently appreciated it, a persistent theme by that stage of whatever I was going through.

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

We counted high telephone bills as part of our deal with each other,

“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. 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.

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

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.

Visible mourning reminds us of death, which is construed as unnatural, a failure to manage the situation.

“A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty,” Philippe Ariès wrote to the point of this aversion in Western Attitudes toward Death.

“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.”

I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.

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

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.

Time is the school in which we learn.

As I recall this 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 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.