The Year of Magical Thinking-Joan Didion
In the midst of life we are in death, Episcopalians say at the graveside. (5)
As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. (8)
After my mother died the undertaker who picked up her body left in its place on the bed an artificial rose. My brother had told me this, offended to the core. I would be armed against artificial roses. (18)
The power of grief to derange the mind has in act been exhaustively noted. (...) "I say that in mourning the subject goes through a modified and transitory manic-depressive state and overcomes it." (34)
"'A night of memories and sighs,' I remembered the lecturer repeating. "A night. One night. It might be all night but he doesn't even say all night, he says a night, not a matter of a lifetime, a matter of some hours."
Hard sweet wisdom. Clearly, since "Rose Alymer" had remained embedded in my memory. I believed it as an undergraduate to offer a lesson for survival. (54)
Why, if those were my images of death, did I remain so unable to accept the fact that he had died? Was it because I was failing to understand it as something that had happened to him? Was it because I was still understanding it as something that had happened to me? (77)
"I told you what working for Life would be like. Didn't I tell you? It would be like being nibbled to death by ducks?" (111)
If the dead were truly to come back, what would they come back knowing? Could we face them? We who allowed them to die? The clear light of day tells me that I did not allow John to die, that I did not have that power, but do I believe that? Does he? (152)
Who is the director of dreams, would he care? (162)
"Most people I know at Westlake don't even know anyone who died," she said, "and just since I've been there I've had a murder and a suicide in my family."
"It all evens out in the end," John said, an answer that bewildered me (what did it mean, couldn't he do better than that?) but one that seemed to satisfy her.
Several years later, after Susan's mother and father died within a year or two of each other, Susan asked if I remembered John telling Quintana that it all evened out in the end. I said I remembered.
"He was right," Susan said. "It did." (172)
...but each of these conversations was curiously open, as if we had found ourselves stranded together on an island. (186)
Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. (188)
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. (198)
As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. (8)
After my mother died the undertaker who picked up her body left in its place on the bed an artificial rose. My brother had told me this, offended to the core. I would be armed against artificial roses. (18)
The power of grief to derange the mind has in act been exhaustively noted. (...) "I say that in mourning the subject goes through a modified and transitory manic-depressive state and overcomes it." (34)
"'A night of memories and sighs,' I remembered the lecturer repeating. "A night. One night. It might be all night but he doesn't even say all night, he says a night, not a matter of a lifetime, a matter of some hours."
Hard sweet wisdom. Clearly, since "Rose Alymer" had remained embedded in my memory. I believed it as an undergraduate to offer a lesson for survival. (54)
Why, if those were my images of death, did I remain so unable to accept the fact that he had died? Was it because I was failing to understand it as something that had happened to him? Was it because I was still understanding it as something that had happened to me? (77)
"I told you what working for Life would be like. Didn't I tell you? It would be like being nibbled to death by ducks?" (111)
If the dead were truly to come back, what would they come back knowing? Could we face them? We who allowed them to die? The clear light of day tells me that I did not allow John to die, that I did not have that power, but do I believe that? Does he? (152)
Who is the director of dreams, would he care? (162)
"Most people I know at Westlake don't even know anyone who died," she said, "and just since I've been there I've had a murder and a suicide in my family."
"It all evens out in the end," John said, an answer that bewildered me (what did it mean, couldn't he do better than that?) but one that seemed to satisfy her.
Several years later, after Susan's mother and father died within a year or two of each other, Susan asked if I remembered John telling Quintana that it all evened out in the end. I said I remembered.
"He was right," Susan said. "It did." (172)
...but each of these conversations was curiously open, as if we had found ourselves stranded together on an island. (186)
Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. (188)
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. (198)