Tate

“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

“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

“sensations of somatic distress occurring in waves lasting from twenty minutes to an hour at a time, a feeling of tightness in the throat, choking with shortness of breath, need for sighing, and an empty feeling in the abdomen, lack of muscular power, and an intense subjective distress described as tension or mental pain.” Tightness in the throat.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking