The Four Months of Marginal Thinking

My friend A lent me Joan Didion's 'The Year of Magical Thinking,' and although she warned me that it might bring me to my knees, it's been giving me fantastic insight on grief.

Even though Didion's husband, John Gregory Dunne, dropped dead during dinner without screwing her over, her situation is not that dissimilar to mine. Like me, she had to learn abruptly to cope with the loss of someone she loves.

I've always loved her ability to put things that leave me speechless into words. Take, for example, this passage on grief:

'Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxyms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.'

What resonated even more with me was the magical thinking referenced in the book's title. Didion confessed that although she allowed an autopsy to be performed and had Dunne's body cremated, she was unable to give away his shoes because he would need them when he returned.

Although I consider myself a mostly rational person, I'm guilty of this kind of thinking myself from time to time. Few people who know me realize that after my dog Oscar died suddenly, I believed my dog Wiley could communicate with him in the great beyond. For a while, I periodically laid my hand on Wiley's head and asked him to send messages to Oscar. After a few months, Wiley told me telepathically to cool it with the crazytalk, so I did.

I realized the other day that I've engaged in some marginal thinking about Dear Husband. I've had this thought, barely even acknowledged in my own mind, that he could fix what went wrong. It was only recently, when he asked if there was anything he could do to help me feel better, that I realized what I'd been hoping. I told him there was nothing he could do without a time machine.

(And some character. But the chances of DH developing character are about the same as his acquiring a time machine.)

I think I'm done with any magical thinking about DH. We all need some magic every once in a while, but sometimes stark reality settles in, and it allows us to see things more clearly.