The Year of Magical Thinking

It's hard to believe that a book entitled The Year of Magical Thinking would be a reference to a year of grief. But that is what Joan Didion's best selling book is, a reminiscence of the year after her husband died from a massive heart attack in their New York home. "Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it", she writes.

So what does a seasoned author, political analyst, and Ivy League intelligencia do when confronted with the unknown? She seeks to understand it. The book is a touching tribute to her husband and family but it is also the ruminations of a woman trying to make sense of death, of grief, of solitude, of the next phase of her life alone. I appreciated her novel which reads like a journey, rational thought mixed with irrational emotion, equal parts self help and cautionary tale. I also liked how she describes the process of moving on. Of course it is deliberate, it is analyzed. The finality coming while crossing Lexington Avenue and realizing one year and one day later that she no longer has a reference of what she and her husband were doing the year before. For the first time in her head, she is without him.

I have sort of a strange fear of death; not my own, per se, but of those people around me. Truthfully, my fear is more likely a fear of regret - that I did not celebrate what I could when I could, that I always thought there would be more time. I remember a great line from Marsha Norman's play 'Night Mother. The protaganist has planned a last quiet evening with her mother before killing herself. The mother, stricken with grief and anger at the impending event, suggests that every night could be like this one if she were to stay alive. The daughter refutes "but it's the next part that makes this last part so good." In her discussion of many emotions and personal thoughts, Ms. Didion never mentions regret when remembering her husband, never dwells on the things they never had the chance to do or the things they would never do again. No regrets.

The message then is to truly live each day as if it were your last.