Enough Already

Joan Didion is starting to get on my nerves.

I loved her book at first. "The Year of Magical Thinking" resonated with me on so many levels for the first 50 pages or so.

But by the time I slogged my way through the middle of the book, I was starting to think of Joan as a repetitive whiner who didn't know when to shut her pie hole. Alright, I wanted to scream, your husband's dead and your daughter's in a coma, I get it! Time to move on!

This just goes to show how that the process of grieving is intensely personal. I'm not really as hard-hearted as I seem - I know that losing your husband of 40 years while your only child is critically ill is the most life-shattering event that could happen to anyone. I completely understand the impulse to analyze it ad nauseum. I just don't want to read about it.

But I couldn't put this turkey down. Toward the end Didion blew up the only common bridge that joined us - she wrote that people often see similarities between divorce and the death of a spouse, but that the two are beyond compare.

She's probably right. In any case, I have to admire someone who managed to marry someone who was her partner in every sense of the word for four decades. If my lame-ass sham of a marriage had lasted more than 10 months, I might want to wax nostalgic about it as well.

But even Didion knows that grief so personal doesn't translate well. She recalled reading Dylan Thomas' widow's memoir of life after his death and being totally appalled by its whiny, self-obsessed tone. But with the passage of nearly 50 years, she finally understood.

'Time is the school in which we learn,' she wrote. Finally, something that we can share.