Anna Rose’s Reviews > The Year of Magical Thinking > Status Update

“Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?”

Wdym Joan Didion and her husband joked about the Princeton Nassoons the way Jackson and I joke about BYU’s Vocal point and that a “long favorite” of the Nassoons was a rendition of a song written by the architect who designed my favorite concert venue (Wolf Trap) where we saw the most special concert of my life (Paul Simon), and she included an excerpt from his obituary in a book about grieving her husband?

“ Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.”

“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 them. Some events would just happen. This was one of those events. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”

“Why, if those were my images of death, did I remain so unable to accept the fact that he had died? Was it because I was failing to understand it as something that had happened to him? Was it because I was still understanding it as something that had happened to me?”