I am no stranger to cancer. I’ve watched documentaries about it, walked to raise money for it, and seen it leave my mother. Last year, it took my grandmother the day before my nineteenth birthday. I remember her house as warm and full of good food, and her voice echoing in the living room on Christmas visits, lit softly by the lights on their tree. I also lost two other people who had much more life to live.
In the wake of these sudden deaths, I was lost. I was deeply upset, but I didn’t know what to do with it. I had to leave class and cry, forgetting who had died for a few minutes and just feeling the hurt, totally confused by my own outburst, my subconscious’ way of shielding me from talking about cancer in that room for another second. That was around the time I picked up Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. I had already watched her documentary, The Center Will Not Hold, so I knew much of her tragic story going into it. She lost her husband and only daughter very close together, and this book was written as an examination of their lives, her grief, and what she could do with it all.
“Death was up close, at home.”
Before science looked anything like it does today, death was much more difficult to prevent. Didion points out the high rate of infant mortality, of death from colds and the flu. Death was all around us, not hidden from sight. Because of this, she feels that grieving was more accepted then and less so now. She also uses this quote as a parallel to her husband John dying at home. He didn’t die separated from her or in a hospital room. She poses the question to her audience; should grief be hidden just because other people are separated from death? American society began to reject public grief, “…as a result of the increasing pressure of a new “ethical duty to enjoy oneself…” A lot of people feel pressured to move on quickly from deaths that occur in their lives, especially when they are close to the deceased. Everyone else has forgotten this person and you feel like you have to hang on to them. Didion spends this year of magical thinking holding on to the memories of her loved ones, and she acknowledges that grieving is a period of life that may never end for some. The process should be open and public, and you should not feel ashamed for grieving “longer” than you should.
With regard to craft, Didion starts the book off with a series of strong images she then repeats, anchoring the book to a central scene. “The way you got sideswiped was by going back.”
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
Her voice was painfully honest, and she is totally transparent with us as we journey with her to try and make sense of the all-encompassing emotion of grief. Every time you remember this person, each new memory you come up with feels like nostalgia at first, but all that fondness seeps out when you remember what happened. Just existing in the present hurts a lot less than living in your memory, and every time she thinks about having dinner with her husband or reminiscing on conversations with her daughter, you can feel that pain with her.
The most relatable observation she makes about death is that no one thinks it will happen to them. With the rare exception, most people live their lives like they are invulnerable, or at least, without death hanging over them. “The entire point slipping into the sea around us was the kind of conclusion I anticipated. I did not anticipate cardiac arrest at the dinner table.” You can do dangerous things and survive, but you can’t anticipate when your time will come. It could be totally random, or it could be a long time coming. After I read that line, I felt a shift. The saying, “live every day like it’s your last” is something I’ve always taken to heart, and those lines were full of that sentiment. Coming to terms with your own mortality is much easier than doing the same with the people you love, and Didion states that this is okay, that you should be as messy as you need to be, and that experiencing loss so acutely might just be magical.