Tate

“Because the reality of death has not yet penetrated awareness, survivors can appear to be quite accepting of the loss.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“Given that grief remained the most general of afflictions its literature seemed remarkably spare.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“The English social anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer, in his 1965 Death, Grief, and Mourning, had described this rejection of public mourning as a result of the increasing pressure of a new “ethical duty to enjoy oneself,” a novel “imperative to do nothing which might diminish the enjoyment of others.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“Philippe Ariès, in a series of lectures he delivered at Johns Hopkins in 1973 and later published as Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, noted that beginning about 1930 there had been in most Western countries and particularly in the United States a revolution in accepted attitudes toward death. “Death,” he wrote, “so omnipresent in the past that it was familiar, would be effaced, would disappear. It would become shameful and forbidden.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking