181. Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
The first year after the death of a loved one is an unreal suspension as the mind struggles to know the new knowledge. Grief is the process of learning that knowledge over and over, every morning’s waking a little reprieve before: you remember. The house, so familiar, becomes a strange zone of lack, your person’s baffling non-presence in every corner—they were there, right there!—and that vacuum is counterweighted by the left-behind stuff that acquires mythic status—the toothbrush and razor, the driver's license, the clothes. In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion examined her bewilderment after her husband John Dunne died unexpectedly of a heart attack a month shy of their 40th wedding anniversary, while their only child, Quintana, lay unconscious in intensive care with pneumonia and septic shock. Didion’s grief took the form of magical rituals, charging her husband's cell phone, keeping his shoes because he would need them when he came back. She couldn’t know the knowledge in that first year.
I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome. … I realized that my impression of myself had been of someone who could look for, and find, the upside in any situation. I had believed in the logic of popular songs. I had looked for the silver lining. I had walked on through the storm. It occurs to me now that these were not even the songs of my generation. … We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. 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.
Links:
The Black Album: review of The Year of Magical Thinking by John Leonard, New York Review of Books, October 20, 2005
Q: How were you able to keep writing after the death of your husband? A: There was nothing else to do. I had to write my way out of it – Emma Brockes, The Guardian, December 16, 2005
Audio interview: Joan Didion, Writing a Story After an Ending, Terry Gross, NPR Fresh Air, October 13, 2005
This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country's 250th anniversary. 250 words on 250 works, from January 1 to December 31, 2026.
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