My Years of Magical Thinking

 

It's funny how the loss of someone you never met can affect you so profoundly. This woman saved my sanity back in the years where I was juggling my mother's death from leukemia and my father's descent into dementia.

There is grief so profound that it can't be cured with a good cry. You need a voice to walk you through those many terrible days and Joan Didion was my voice. I listened to this audio book over and over for years-probably hundreds of times. She gave me permission not to always rise above it. It was the first time I heard that it was okay not to be okay and I was so not okay. 

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live.."

It was only later that I discovered that she was also the voice of my generation. I plowed through her other books, biographies and documentaries and found a blueprint on how to take the spirit of our youth and apply it to our own last chapters. 

Hers is now written. 

"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.”

Joan Didion

The Year of Magical Thinking