You Sit Down to Dinner and Life As You Know It Ends

Joan Didion is an author of long standing acclaim. Her long career as a writer includes five novels and several books in the nonfiction genre. Her essays have been published in many journals.

She writes now, in autobiographical mode, of the extent and reality of sudden calamity in her life. In December 2003, her daughter became seriously ill. Didion and her husband became caregivers for their adult daughter who was being treated for a critical condition of unknown origin. Late on the night of December 30, 2003, her husband suffered a massive heart attack and died nearly instantly while at supper.

In this chronicle of those interwoven tragic events, ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’, Didion writes of the emotions and the memories and the near impossibility of understanding grief.

Her theme seems to be expressed as follows.

“ … Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes. …

Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself…” pp. 188, 189

And Didion repeats her catch phrase throughout the book, “You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends…”