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.

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.

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.

It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it

In time of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control.

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