Seven down, forty-five to go.

Seven down, forty-five to go.

The Year Of Magical Thinking
by Joan Didion

Wow, I'm behind. And it's my own damn fault for picking Joan Didion's The Year Of Magical Thinking, in the mistaken belief that reading about someone else's mourning process might help me understand my own. Instead, it only reminded me how insurmountable grief can seem, and how difficult it is to discuss with anyone else since we're so trained that death is something we get over in time. I don't think it is, or at least if it is I haven't been allowed a sufficient amount of time to reconcile my own grief at my father's death. And if we do get over these feelings in time, I strongly doubt that time is something we can measure in lengths of human comprehension.

The most interesting thing, so far, that I've gleaned from Didion is the weird avoidance of really facing death head-on because, on some level, we kind of think they might come back. Her case was made even more difficult since her husband died WHILE their daughter was in an ICU unit, so she was juggling some pretty heavy baggage (not that any loss is less great, but she was slipping into something they clinically called "complicated grief" or "pathological bereavement").

All the same, it's difficult to read a book like hers because the universality of human experience really stuns you. You realize that yes, everyone feels the same bottomless sense of loss, and everyone does their best to avoid it. Even "working through" grief doesn't seem to extinguish the source, it only serves to offer us mechanisms for functioning throughout the day.

It's funny that we can feel at our most alone experiencing an emotion that is universal in its touch.

Why did it take me so long to read this? And why, once it became obvious just how difficult is was going to be, did I not just set the book aside and read something else in order to keep up the pace? I don't have a satisfying explanation for that, other than to admit that it felt like cheating to dodge this one, and once I cracked open its covers, reading anything other than periodicals (to continue literal contact with daily events) felt like cheating too. Sometimes I could only handle a few pages a week before retreating to The Economist in some hope that some burgeoning genocide might apply a numbing balm upon my own internal rawness, but in the end I knew I had to take it all in, and I'm glad I did.


Didion doesn't say everything's going to be all right. If anything she's more of a mess a year after her husband's death than she was the night after. But one thing Didion does do is offer the solace that everyone has to deal with this, so even if some mistaken notion of propriety halts us from showing our grief outwardly -- even years after the initial loss -- we can take some comfort in realizing that more probably than not, the people surrounding us know just how we feel.