Photo Credit: Jan Kahánek via Unsplash
By: Kiera Garcia – Associate Culture Editor
To get me through this new period of life, as a final year student, the works of Joan Didion have been my scripture. Recently, searching for a novel that would help me accept the coming changes, I turned to The Year of Magical Thinking. The Year of Magical Thinking consists of journal-like entries from Didion as she processes the year after her husband’s sudden death. The immediate change that comes from this event, as well as the changes that she faces throughout the following year, are explored in an almost circular fashion.
The first thing that stuck out to me about Didion’s account of her grief was her tendency to repeat phrases throughout the book, bringing the reader back to the same core ideas. A way of describing John’s death for her was to continually come back to the phrase ‘You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.’ Despite this being a quite literal explanation of the way John died, suddenly and at the dinner table, it also evokes an acknowledgement of large changes in a person’s life often happening in the most mundane moments. Changes don’t always come when expected; they can come over the phone, at a coffee shop, or in the middle of dinner.
Another phrase that Didion repeats in the second half of the book is ‘As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end.’ She struggled a lot throughout the first months after John passed to truly accept that he was gone. Whether it was making sure that he had his shoes available if he ever needed them or scouring medical journals for statistics on the preventability of a heart attack, she was making sure that if he ever was to return, she would be able to be there and change what had happened. It is only in the later stages of the book that she fully acknowledges that there was nothing she could have done to change the way he died. He was always going to die of a heart attack, and she was always going to be unable to prevent it. Change is inevitable and denying that it happens does not prevent it.
As Didion moves away from her initial denial of John’s absence and begins to reflect on the time immediately after he passed, she realises that by continually intellectualising what had happened and stopping herself from feeling her grief, she hadn’t yet begun to mourn him. The difference, she says, is that grief is something thrust onto you from loss whereas mourning is the action you take to process what has happened and honour the person who has passed. Because she had been obsessing about the change and how it happened, she hadn’t allowed herself to feel it. To help explain the way she was approaching mourning, she took John’s words with her: ‘You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change.’ She knew she was clinging onto what had been by only allowing herself to feel grief; mourning meant accepting John was gone and exploring what the world would look like without him in it.
There is much to learn from Didion’s own examination of her grief, as all facets of change involve some level of grieving the life you have lived that will no longer exist in the same way. I think the most important lessons I drew from this novel were to allow yourself to feel the change instead of trying to reason it away, as well as the fact that change will always come and, by accepting that, you are more able to go with it when it does. Change doesn’t have to be a looming horror, instead it can be the first step in moving forward and becoming who you want to be.