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Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death.

As Didion begins the final chapters in The Year of Magical Thinking, she evaluates her personal experience with grief and analyzes how it has differed dramatically from her prior expectations. Didion discusses how our society has a set of expectations concerning the loss of a loved one, and how, when discussing grief, people usually focus on the period immediately following the death. As a culture, Didion claims that we focus on this period because emotions run the strongest in the immediate aftermath of great personal loss. For Didion, the weeks following John’s death had largely been a blur, in which she followed the rituals associated with death and had the comfort and support of friends and family. In the months that followed, however, she experiences the greatest tests as she starts to re-engage with her life and come to terms with how she has changed as a result of John’s death.

Didion emphasizes that grief is a highly individualized, personal experience that varies from person to person and cannot be anticipated. She says that, as much as we may try to imagine or understand what the loss of a loved one will do to us, we can never fully understand our reaction to grief until we have gone through it ourselves. As a highly rational and functional person, Didion didn’t expect that she would go through a sustained period of insanity in which she engaged in irrational and delusional lines of thinking. Grief defied all expectations and seemed to run counter to the most fundamental aspects of her personality. She concludes that grief is a uniquely transformative experience, entirely different than the normal emotional experiences of anger, sadness, and confusion we all face on a routine basis. Grief, like love, takes us to surprising places and unearths atypical reactions and responses.

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