The Year of Magical Thinking

Joan Didion

“We never know we go,—when we are going
We jest and shut the door;
Fate following behind us bolts it,
And we accost no more.” ~ Emily Dickinson

Death and illness is around us, and as we grow older, even more so. Or maybe we become even more conscious of it. And yet, it is as Yudhishtira answered the Yaksha’s question – “What is the greatest wonder?” with “Day after day countless people die. Yet the living wish to think they will live forever. O Lord, what can be a greater wonder?”

Not only do we not think about our own death, we extend some of that immortality to our near and dear too. And even when we know otherwise, I have realised that it’s nearly impossible to prepare for it. Joan Didion’s attempt to reorient herself in the weeks and months after her husband’s sudden demise and her daughter’s illness is at once personal and universal, and I found myself nodding along quite a bit.

In one chapter, she writes about people who seem to be good at ‘managing things’. They could call people, influence others to do their bidding. Control the narrative. In some respect, I am like that. I believe that things can be planned and managed without fuss. Illness and death, and their accompaniments, I have realised, smirk at that perspective, and coolly dismantle it.

Another gut wrenching part is a statement she makes that really underlines the devastation that grief brings – “I just can’t see the upside in this”. If you can imagine your own life after a dear one’s loss, perhaps you could get a sense of how profound the line is. In Philippe Ariès’ words “A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”

Some of the other parts that really resonated with me –
“Grief when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be…What I felt in each instance was sadness, loneliness (the loneliness of the abandoned child of whatever age), regret for time gone by, for things unsaid, for my inability to share or even in any real way to acknowledge, at the end, the pain and helplessness and physical humiliation they each endured.”
“The death of a parent, he wrote, ‘despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago ‘”

Joan Didion articulates what many of us might have felt during the loss of someone dear. Reading The Year of Magical Thinking is a cathartic experience, one I’d highly recommend.