The Year of Magical Thinking

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.

Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
The question of self-pity.
You see how early the question of self-pity entered the picture.

Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
The question of self-pity

You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
In a heartbeat.
Or the absence of one.

I needed to be alone so that he could come back.

Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be.

As I recall this I realize how open we are to the persistent message that we can avert death.
And to its punitive correlative, the message that if death catches us we have only ourselves to blame.

This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself.

meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs,

confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred,

ou had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that.

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.

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.

Why did I think that this improvisation could never end?
If I had seen that it could, what would I have done differently?
What would he?

remember despising the book Dylan Thomas’s widow Caitlin wrote after her husband’s death, Leftover Life to Kill. I remember being dismissive of, even censorious about, her “self-pity,” her “whining,” her “dwelling on it.” Leftover Life to Kill was published in 1957. I was twenty-two years old. Time is the school in which we learn.

could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response.

“A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty,” Philippe Ariès wrote

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.

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.

I had not sufficiently appreciated it, a persistent theme by that stage of whatever I was going through.