Joan Didion

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.

You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

did not believe in the resurrection of the body but I still believed that given the right circumstances he would come back.

When he died I stopped having dreams.

Was it possible to feel anger and simultaneously to feel responsible?

We are not idealized wild things.
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.

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.

“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 might, 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.”