"People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness. It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist's office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off. These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible. I myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal. I seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead, entered a place in which I could be seen only by those who were themselves recently bereaved. I understood for the first time the power in the image of the rivers, the Styx, the Lethe, the cloaked ferryman with his practice of suttee. Widows did not throw themselves on the burning raft out of grief. The burning raft was instead an accurate representation of the place to which their grief (not their families, not the community, not custom, their grief) had taken them."
-- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

Because of my own passing interest in death and loss and, by extension, grief, I'd been meaning to read The Year of Magical Thinking for quite some time. I'd avoided it, though. I was afraid of it. I was afraid of being thrown back into grief (an awkward state from which escape seems impossible). But finally the erudite kaaronwarren mentioned it & finally I was in Berkelouw Books in Leichhardt looking for something to read and life seemed good. So I bought it and started reading it today and goddamn, goddamn, thank god Didion's only documenting a year.

What I'm learning, though -- for all the muted optimism of her title (The Year, one year, not a life, not life) -- is that grief, once it gets a hold, leaves a path. Grief alters everything forever. When grief knows you, knows how to find you, it's always there. Grief, the shadow, the warrior virus, the terrorist, the hitman.

Didion writes a story that feels necessary. She writes with a vocab that's recognisable. Hell, I think I myself wrote some of Didion's sentences years ago, and she's now written some of mine.

(I remember a friend of mine, in the midst of grief, one day saying, "I could lie down in the middle of the road and no one would see me.")

Don't read this book, don't read this book. Grief is dangerous. And Didion has left the door open.