from The Year of Magical Thinking

Last weekend Stephanie gave me a book called The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion about the author's exploration of death and grief after her husband passes away. I've been reading a little of it this week and today I read something that really spoke to me, so I thought I'd share it. Highly recommended book, btw.

"My father died a few days short of his eighty-fifth birthday and my mother a month short of her ninety first, both after some years of increasing debility. What I felt in each instance was sadness, loneliness (the loneliness of the abandoned child of whatever age), regret for time gone by, for things unsaid, for my inability to share or even in any real way to acknowledge, at the end, the pain and helplessness and physical humiliation they each endured. I understood the enevitability of each of their deaths...They remained, when they did occur, distanced, at a remove from the ongoing dailiness of my life. After my mother died I received a letter from a friend in Chicago, a former Maryknoll priest, who precisely intuited what I felt. The death of a parent, he wrote, 'despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago. We mightk, in that indeterminate period they call mourning, be in a submarine, silent on the ocean's bed, aware of the depth charges, now near and now far, buffeting us with recollections.'"