![]() When we anticipate the funeral we wonder about failing to “get through it,” rise to the occasion, exhibit the “strength” that invariably gets mentioned as the correct response to death. We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place. The worst days will be the earliest days. In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be “healing.” A certain forward movement will prevail. In this passage, she distinguishes between our image of what grief will be like and the reality of actually experiencing it for ourselves, a description that rings completely true to me based on my own experience of loss. ![]() Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most illuminating insights into grief come from Didion herself. Given that grief touches virtually all of us as some stage in our lives, there is surprisingly little coverage of it in the sources Didion finds close to hand. In an attempt to make sense of the range of emotions she is experiencing, Didion begins to explore the literature on grief, turning initially to poetry, novels and memoirs. ‘ How could he come back if they took his organs, how could he come back if he had no shoes?’ 32-33)Īs she looks back at that time, Didion identifies a number of instances of this covert thinking which remained somewhat hidden from others and even from herself: she had not been able to read the obituaries when they appeared in the papers as they would have confirmed John’s death she had resisted the suggestions to clear his clothes, to give them away to charity, as he might need them when he returns she had declined a request from the hospital to donate his organs. I needed to be alone so that he could come back. 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. Of course I had already delivered the definitive news to his brother and to my brother and to Quintana’s husband. I see now that my insistence on spending that first night alone was more complicated than it seemed, a primitive instinct. Despite the fact that Didion appeared cool and rational in the hours and days immediately following John’s death, she began to believe that she could bring him back, ‘to reverse time, to run the film backwards.’ Written between October and December 2004, the book’s title has its origins in “magical thinking,” a state whereby a person believes that their thoughts and wishes can bring about certain events or change an outcome in some way. It is a deeply personal exploration of these concepts, all written in Didion’s signature style, that of the cool, perceptive, surgically-precise chronicler of our times. The Year of Magical Thinking charts Didion’s attempts to make sense of the weeks and months that followed these tumultuous events in her life, a period that swept away any previous beliefs she had held about illness and death and grief, about probability and luck, about marriage and children and memory, about life itself. She had been there since Christmas Day when, what had at first appeared to be a case of flu, suddenly morphed into pneumonia and septic shock. At the same time, the couple’s only child, Quintana, was lying unconscious in an intensive care unit at the Beth Israel North Medical Center in the city. Moments later, John experienced a massive coronary event that was to lead to his death. On the evening of 30 th December 2003, Joan Didion sat down to dinner with her husband and fellow writer, John Gregory Dunne, at their home in New York. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
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