Joan Didion (2005) The Year of Magical Thinking. Knopf.

1. “It all evens out in the end.” Meaning that “bad” things will happen to everyone. 173

2. “We have no way of knowing that the funeral will not be the issue . . . Nor can we know ahead of the fact . . . the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.” 189

3. “You sit down at dinner and life as you know it ends.”

People in grief think a great deal about self-pity. Visible mourning reminds us of death, which is construed as unnatural, a failure to manage the situation. “A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty,” Philippe Aries wrote to the point of this aversion in Western Attitudes Towards Death.” “But one no longer has the right to say so aloud.” . . . Only survivors of a death are truly left alone.” 194-5

4. “We are repeatedly left, in other words, with no further focus but ourselves, a source from which self-pity naturally flows. Each time this happens (it happens still) I am struck again by the permanent impassibility of the divide . . . Yet on each occasion these pleas for his presence serve only to reinforce my awareness of the final silence that separated us. 195-6.

5. Sherwin Nuland “the tenacious young men and women see their patient’s pupils become unresponsive to light and then widen until they are large fixed circles of impenetrable blackness. Reluctantly the team stops its efforts . . . The room is strewn with the debris of a lost campaign . . .” (fixed and dilated pupils = FDPs) 202

6. “We call it the widow maker, pal” his cardiologist in New York had said about the left anterior descending artery. 203

7. I also notice that I do not have the resilience I had a year ago. A certain number of crises occur and the mechanism that floods the situation with adrenalin burns out. Mobilization becomes unreliable, slow or absent. 213

8. As the grandchild of a geologist I learned early to appreciate the absolute mutability of hills and waterfalls and even islands . . . A hill is a transitional accommodation to stress, and ego may be a similar accommodation. 220

9. “. . . there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.

Let them become the photograph on the table.” In fact the apprehension that our life together will decreasingly be the center of my every day seemed today on Lexington Avenue so distinct a betrayal that I lost all sense of oncoming traffic. 226