# The Year of Magical Thinking Tags: #literature ## Metadata * Author: [Joan Didion](https://www.amazon.comundefined) * ASIN: B000OI0FS0 * ISBN: 0008485127 * Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000OI0FS0 * [Kindle link](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000OI0FS0) I find myself reading The Year of Magical Thinking in order to make sense of my grief, not only from this year, but from all the years since the pandemic. The people lost. The years lost. I am astonished at how Didion lost her husband, then her daughter within such a short span of time. My mind mulls this over because it considers, as if it were a new realization, the fact that very little is within our control. My fiancé and I are planning our wedding. We fully expect to commit to one another, live long lives together, possibly/hopefully with kids in our future. But all of that could simply not happen for one reason or another out of our control. Didion's husband passing, while sudden and unexpected, maybe a little premature, is not unreasonable. He was 71. Within a marriage, it is highly likely that one spouse will bury the other. But to lose her daughter (not covered in this book, but indulge me skipping ahead) is completely unreasonable. Parents don't typically expect to bury their children. But it could happen. And no amount of magical thinking will change it if it does. How does one move past that? How does one overcome? We could split hairs over the definition of overcoming, but sometimes I doubt that anyone truly overcomes. The people in my life who I know who have experienced grave loss - they may function, they may even function admirably, but I can feel the ghosts of their losses echoing in their actions, words; dare I say it is written all over their faces. One of my aunts lost everything in an awful (more awful than usual) divorce, counseling me to ensure I keep separate bank accounts and get a prenup. After losing K my friends and I made a Life360 circle, started sharing locations, pressing everyone to text once they got home. Attempts at omniscience, to make us feel omnipotence. Maybe if we could have known, we would have been able to do something. Maybe if we become better at knowing, we can do more in the future. Echoes of loss. What Didion I have in common: the training to go to the literature. To read. To use the words of others to make sense of things we don’t understand. Another thought that resonates with me here - her network of friends and ppl, herself included, that believe that everything can be managed if they can just understand it. Something can be done, someone can be called. I can see it as she writes but how she reads the medical literatures, understands terminology about embolism and brain damage, one needs to understand to feel like they could do something about it, to feel like they could have done something about it. If we could understand better what was happening we could have avoided it. Or maybe if we could understand better we could prove we did the right thing. I can hear this line of thinking whenever my eldest cousin or my dad talks about Uncle E. Eldest cousin in particular always recaps the medical history, the details that trickled in from his doctors and nurses at Montefiore, to justify his decision to pull the plug. To know and decide again that this made sense. That it was the right thing to do. I am interested in her observation that lack of sufficient appreciation had become a theme. Not sure what's there yet, but something's there. What Didion calls vortexes - these little details, sceneries, places, moments that are like minefields, that remind you of what you lost. A street she used to drive on. A hotel she stayed at with her husband. Her daughter's wedding day. I imagine all the things that could one day be my vortexes if I had to be without him. Grand Central. I find myself panicking that one if us will inevitably have to bury the other. I nag him about his vegetables, his diet, eating healthy, working out. If I do this maybe he will live forever. Maybe I won’t have to bury him. Magical thinking. I found myself thinking about K again at a party for a christening the other day, the daughter of a coworker/good friend of my mom’s. Saw the kids running around the party, playing the games, dancing, in one of those event venues on the Long Island Sound, not altogether different from the one my wedding will be at. And again I think about K’s family. How they will miss him at many more christenings. How we will miss him at our wedding. How we will miss him at our children’s christenings. ## Highlights Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be. — location: [270](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000OI0FS0&location=270) ^ref-24906 --- 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. — location: [282](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000OI0FS0&location=282) ^ref-14898 --- grief remains peculiar among derangements: “It never occurs to us to regard it as a pathological condition and to refer it to medical treatment.” We rely instead on “its being overcome after a certain lapse of time.” — location: [348](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000OI0FS0&location=348) ^ref-50133 --- In time of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control. — location: [456](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000OI0FS0&location=456) ^ref-53908 --- I will not forget the instinctive wisdom of the friend who, every day for those first few weeks, brought me a quart container of scallion-and-ginger congee from Chinatown. Congee I could eat. Congee was all I could eat. — location: [644](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000OI0FS0&location=644) ^ref-30881 --- You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. — location: [658](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000OI0FS0&location=658) ^ref-63410 --- 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. — location: [1046](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000OI0FS0&location=1046) ^ref-51792 --- Many people to whom I spoke in those first days while Quintana lay unconscious at UCLA seemed free of this apprehension. Their initial instinct was that this event could be managed. In order to manage it they needed only information. They needed only to know how this had happened. They needed answers. They needed “the prognosis.” I had no answers. — location: [1048](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000OI0FS0&location=1048) ^ref-11878 --- There was a morning on which the “gilded-boy story” seemed to represent, in its utter impenetrability and apparent disregard for the sensitivity of the patient, the entire situation with which I was faced. — location: [1125](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000OI0FS0&location=1125) ^ref-19324 --- So profound was the isolation in which I was then operating that it did not immediately occur to me that for the mother of a patient to show up at the hospital wearing blue cotton scrubs could only be viewed as a suspicious violation of boundaries. — location: [1129](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000OI0FS0&location=1129) ^ref-11163 --- I saw immediately in Los Angeles that its potential for triggering this vortex effect could be controlled only by avoiding any venue I might associate with either Quintana or John. — location: [1198](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000OI0FS0&location=1198) ^ref-38477 --- I had last stayed in such a room in October 2003, alone, doing promotion, two months before John died. Yet the Beverly Wilshire seemed when Quintana was at UCLA the only safe place for me to be, the place where everything would be the same, the place where no one would know about or refer to the events of my recent life; the place where I would still be the person I had been before any of this happened. — location: [1211](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000OI0FS0&location=1211) ^ref-33323 --- Had I not made that call would Quintana have moved back to Los Angeles when she graduated from Barnard? Had she been living in Los Angeles would Beth Israel North have happened, would Presbyterian have happened, would she be in UCLA today? Had I not misread the meaning of the red flashing light in late 1987 would I be able to get in my car today and drive west on San Vicente and find John at the house in Brentwood Park? Standing in the pool? Rereading Sophie’s Choice? — location: [1400](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000OI0FS0&location=1400) ^ref-2947 --- Just an ordinary day. “And then—gone.” — location: [1446](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000OI0FS0&location=1446) ^ref-14535 --- Why do you always have to be right. Why do you always have to have the last word. For once in your life just let it go. — location: [1501](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000OI0FS0&location=1501) ^ref-36702 --- Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention. — location: [1516](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000OI0FS0&location=1516) ^ref-48020 --- 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? — location: [1553](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000OI0FS0&location=1553) ^ref-32259 --- There were no faint traces about dead, no pencil marks. Any faint traces, any pencil marks, were left “a night or two before he died,” or “a week or two before,” in any case decisively before he died. There was a divide. — location: [1578](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000OI0FS0&location=1578) ^ref-7277 --- Yet having seen the picture in no way deflected, when it came, the swift empty loss of the actual event. It was still black and white. Each of them had been in the last instant alive, and then dead. I realized that I had never believed in the words I had learned as a child in order to be confirmed as an Episcopalian: I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting, amen. — location: [1585](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000OI0FS0&location=1585) ^ref-21123 --- I imagined this way of thinking to be clarifying, but in point of fact it was so muddled as to contradict even itself. I did not believe in the resurrection of the body but I still believed that given the right circumstances he would come back. He who left the faint traces before he died, the Number Three pencil. — location: [1591](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000OI0FS0&location=1591) ^ref-31361 --- I opened the book. I looked at the dedication. “For Dorothy Burns Dunne, Joan Didion, Quintana Roo Dunne,” the dedication read. “Generations.” I had forgotten this dedication. I had not sufficiently appreciated it, a persistent theme by that stage of whatever I was going through. — location: [1636](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000OI0FS0&location=1636) ^ref-20375 --- I recall that John and I took different views of what had happened in 1987. As he saw it, he now had a death sentence, temporarily suspended. He often said, after the 1987 angioplasty, that he now knew how he was going to die. As I saw it, the timing had been providential, the intervention successful, the problem solved, the mechanism fixed. You no more know how you’re going to die than I do or anyone else does, I remember saying. I realize now that his was the more realistic view. — location: [1676](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000OI0FS0&location=1676) ^ref-23684 --- Created: November 28, 2023 Last Modified: November 30, 2023 He had wanted to be Joe and Gertrude Black. So had I. We hadn’t made it. “Fritter away” was a definition in the crossword that morning. The word it defined was five letters, “waste.” Was that what we had done? Was that what he thought we had done? Why didn’t I listen when he said we weren’t having any fun? Why didn’t I move to change our life? — location: [1961](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000OI0FS0&location=1961) ^ref-21240 --- In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be “healing.” A certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days. We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place. 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 anticipate needing to steel ourselves for the moment: will I be able to greet people, will I be able to leave the scene, will I be able even to get dressed that day? We have no way of knowing that this will not be the issue. 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. — location: [1975](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000OI0FS0&location=1975) ^ref-53911 --- As a child I thought a great deal about meaninglessness, which seemed at the time the most prominent negative feature on the horizon. After a few years of failing to find meaning in the more commonly recommended venues I learned that I could find it in geology, so I did. This in turn enabled me to find meaning in the Episcopal litany, most acutely in the words as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, which I interpreted as a literal description of the constant changing of the earth, the unending erosion of the shores and mountains, the inexorable shifting of the geological structures that could throw up mountains and islands and could just as reliably take them away. — location: [1985](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000OI0FS0&location=1985) ^ref-37680 --- Later, after I married and had a child, I learned to find equal meaning in the repeated rituals of domestic life. Setting the table. Lighting the candles. Building the fire. Cooking. All those soufflés, all that crème caramel, all those daubes and albóndigas and gumbos. Clean sheets, stacks of clean towels, hurricane lamps for storms, enough water and food to see us through whatever geological event came our way. These fragments I have shored against my ruins, were the words that came to mind then. These fragments mattered to me. I believed in them. — location: [1995](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000OI0FS0&location=1995) ^ref-23302 --- People in grief think a great deal about self-pity. We worry it, dread it, scourge our thinking for signs of it. We fear that our actions will reveal the condition tellingly described as “dwelling on it.” We understand the aversion most of us have to “dwelling on it.” 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. “But one no longer has the right to say so aloud.” — location: [2015](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000OI0FS0&location=2015) ^ref-5511 --- We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know. — location: [2057](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000OI0FS0&location=2057) ^ref-15791 --- 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. — location: [2075](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000OI0FS0&location=2075) ^ref-19414 *This strikes me. I find myself mourning K as we all were. Young. Idealists. Invincible. We will never feel invincible ever again.* --- 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. — location: [2358](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000OI0FS0&location=2358) ^ref-54715 ---