“We are not idealized wild things. 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.” -- from "The Year of Magical Thinking," author Joan Didion's memoir of her life and her grief following the sudden death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, in 2003, while caring for their daughter following her near death from pneumonia and septic shock. The "magical thinking" that Didion expresses is in the form of believing things will go back to "normal" if she hoped enough or if she did things as if her husband would be returning. Stunning book of introspection and honesty. She turns 87 today.
(photo: Didion and Dunne. Jolain Muller)
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