Joan Didion

From my mother I inherited my looks and a tendency to migraine.

I did no good works but I tried to keep in touch.

This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself.

As I recall this I realize how open we are to the persistent message that we can avert death.
And to its punitive correlative, the message that if death catches us we have only ourselves to blame.

In time of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control.

We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.

It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it. I recognize now that there was nothing unusual in this: confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred

Fires said we were home, we had drawn the circle, we were safe through the night. I lit the candles.

I did not always think he was right nor did he always think I was right but we were each the person the other trusted.

I understood the inevitability of each of their deaths. I had been expecting (fearing, dreading, anticipating) those deaths all my life. They remained, when they did occur, distanced, at a remove from the ongoing dailiness of my life.