questions of why and how

“I think I am starting to understand her grief a little more now.” I thought this to myself after I finished reading Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. The book clutched me and wouldn’t let go; I could sense how much Didion needed to write it, and even though I am fortunate not to completely understand her thoughts about death, I understood why I needed to read it just the same. One reviewer said “..I can’t imagine dying without this book.” I wish I had been living the past two years with this book. He is, I believe, expressing his gratitude (and mine) for Didion’s words, gratitude that she is speaking to us from within that seemingly impenetrable fog which hangs onto death, she is communicating the affects of loss, sharing how it dismantles and disorients and dements her. Her story sounded so familiar to me. And that is what I mean by “understanding her grief a little more now.” I can begin to illuminate, with her words, the little corners of the past two years, where death has been living near me, where the leftover parts of a person who had to met death, reside. I am not in an aftermath, but I live near one. And I’ve watched the way this changes a person, I’ve seen her go from an open canvas, to a stored painting, to close herself up. And I’ve seen how some days the mundane and simple actions of life are just left out, like an unfinished project. Keys are forgotten, cell phones are left behind, exact recipes cannot be followed, as if the brain is operating in another plane, above all the rhythms that keep this one intact. That’s exactly it. It’s as if she has gone to another place, like Didion talks about, a place where the rational and normal cannot exist. They cannot exist in the place she is, because if they did, then the death of her husband, and the death of Catherine’s 27-year-old brother would never have occurred. Not in a normal world. Not in a rational system. Not in a world of logical explanations and the best medical professionals, or the strongest treatments, or the most blessings and luck and good fortune. They wouldn’t have died in such a world as that. As humans we think this to be true; that death won’t, that death can’t come to the people we love. Especially when they are young, and healthy, and strong. As Didion writes, “I realize how open we are to the persistent message that we can avert death.” (pg 206) Well of course, when we are young, and if we grow up in health, and wealth, and comfort, we take this message seriously. As we age, and become more familiar with death, we become more attuned to this message and take more seriously those tips for beating the odds. But in terms of probability, we know the death of an older adult is more likely, and we can understand, in terms of health and aging and disease, how death happens to older people. We might even be able to understand the why: “Well, he lived a long and prosperous life.” “She was survived by 4 children and 19 grandchildren.” “Their time has come.” But how do we understand the loss of a child? Of a 27 year old triathlete?

The how or the why? How can this death be understood, in our rational minds?

It cannot. And that is what I have witnessed in the past two years, is watching someone rise to the insurmountable task of understanding death. Of trying to live both in this rational world that failed her, and in that world where she has been thrust, where magical thinking, and dream visits, and memories and odd occurrences make up the disjointed rhythm of life. I am starting to understand now that this way of living is called grief. That grief is actually a way of living. It is another plane. And I am able to see now, that this place of grief, to those neighboring it, is like a fog; it doesn’t stop her from waking up, or going to work but it makes her path blurry and her step cautious, it won’t last all day, but will suddenly and ominously descend from above like a wet and heavy cloak over her shoulders. I see her when she’s in that dense cloud, and I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to reach her, because I don’t even know where that world exists for me. But I know that others do, and that someday, despite the messages, and the medicine, and all the luck and good fortune, I too will know the feeling of that fog, and I will reread Didion’s book for comfort, and will probably not understand even a fraction more of the how and why of death but maybe of the magical thinking in it’s wake.