‘Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.’ That is how Joan Didion opens her memoir ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’ recounting her beloved husband’s unexpected death at the dinner table. I could sense the deep emotional pain in this unexpected event that scarred a quotidian routine like dinner. I revisited my own encounter with the loss of my grandma. Unlike Didion’s husband's sudden departure, my grandma’s illness was long and painful and I knew death was lurking in the corner.
Together for almost forty years, Didion and her husband John Gregory Dunne spent long hours in front of typewriters and computers, browsing through manuscripts and editing and fine tuning their work as essayists and journalists. They shared a beautiful daughter Quintana who was battling her very serious illness and was in coma during her father’s death. Didion speaks candidly of the toll that her husband’s death and her daughter's brutal ailment had on her.
I read her memoir in 2023 after I had come to peace with my grandma’s death in 2022. I thought I had already shown grief at the backdoor. I thought I had moved on. But with Joan’s memoir, I came face to face with the tougher questions I tried to avoid. ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’ helped me revisit grief in a new way.
The Oxford dictionary explains grief like this, ‘grief (over/at something) a feeling of great sadness, especially when someone dies.’ This great sadness that the dictionary talks about can never be understood in its depth until it is felt and experienced. Grief is a lived experience and no dictionary can truly describe what it means. Grief needs to be felt to be understood.
I can imagine a frantic Didion as her husband collapses over an intimate family dinner. I can picture a regular conversation stopping midway, the panic, the anxiety, the turmoil that precedes the doorbell and the hastened arrival of the paramedics.
Didion had no time to prepare for death. No time to feel a drop in pulse. No time to witness the stopping of breath, no time to imagine a funeral or the eerie smell of lilies that follow it.
Today, I look at my own encounter with death and see what that experience taught me. I was born and raised by my grandma and spent twenty four years of my life with her. We shared a deep friendship and spiritual bond and I very rarely spent days apart from her. In fact, I couldn’t imagine life without her. But, these innocent and glorious days came to a halt. My family and I contracted Covid-19 and my lovely Nana found out that she was no exception.
The following months gave us all a foretaste of hell. We found ourselves bracing through countless doctors’ visits, IV drips, endless vials of medicine, painful bedsores, soiled bed sheets and the like. When death came to visit Nana, we saw how nonchalant it really was. How it moved stealthily, took her life away and left as we continued to stare at her expressionless face. It happened in an instant, the same ‘instant’ that Didion described. Nana ceased to be a person but a body.
Nana’s death was evident from the start and unlike Didion, we had time to prepare the elegy. But my question really is this. Can one really prepare for death? Can grief’s wrath be lightened? Can death be reduced to an emotion?
If I would have to answer this question myself. I’d say no. We can never prepare for death. Neither ours nor our loved one. Death is what it is. We can read thousands of books on death and read the exact physiological and psychological process. But death will always remain a mystery. Our stomachs will always churn at the thought of death. We will never know what’s on the other side.
Didion and I stand on opposite ends of the spectrum. We both experienced loss differently. The ‘instant’ we encountered was different. Both of us watched as our loved ones took their final breath. Both of us saw death in the eye- at home. A place we never thought would lighten the burden of a hospital bed. We responded differently. However, both of us gave the same answer- grief.
Loss and grief will meet us as unexpectedly as death. They will show us that life can never be measured in years but in moments. These fleeting yet infinite moments. These are what gives life meaning. Life is beautiful because it is messy and nonlinear. It promises us nothing and yet it gives us hope. Life’s only finality is death. Maybe the purpose of life is grief and by grieving well, we have lived well.