Joan Didion

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.

Yet I had always at some level apprehended, because I was born fearful, that some events in life would remain beyond my ability to control or manage

In the midst of life we are in death, Episcopalians say at the graveside.

, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish.