on grief

"Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." -Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

Grief is an intangible thing for those who remain untouched by it. But it is inevitable, something I have realized upon turning the last page of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, an account of a widowed author attempting to make sense of her husband's sudden death. One particular thought of hers really struck me-- the fact that "everything evens out in the end," that bad things will happen to all of us. It is a part of the human inclination to live happily that we are disillusioned into living as if we were immortal. Taking things for granted, not paying attention to the things and the people around us-- we live as if we were to live forever. 

This is a discovery Didion describes, stringing the reader along in her desolate journey through her year of magical thinking. She sits down to dinner one night to have her husband collapse from a catastrophic cardiac event. The normalcy of it all is what is shocking. Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. The fact that bad things are so imminently possible is sobering. We are told to not take things for granted. But how many of us actually do not? It is the first step to moving past the grief. Having little regrets.