What We Can Learn From Grief, Magical Thinking, and Joan Didion

Grief is a universal experience, but its ubiquity does not make it any easier. To cushion the blows of a loved one’s death, magical practices have had their own special place in grieving processes. Magical rites are enacted at the time of death, at funerals, at memorials, at graves. Some practice magic every day in honor of their departed loved ones as an act of remembrance and respect. In many instances, it may work as a healthy coping mechanism. But it can perhaps grant false promises of a cure.

Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking is remembered as one of the most vulnerable and raw autobiographical recollections of grief in the 21^st century. The book begins with the discovery of her unconscious husband, John Gregory Dunne, on the floor of their living room, and each subsequent chapter follows Didion in her complicated journey of coming to terms with Dunne’s death from a heart attack.

Didion begins the mourning process with diligence and does what many writers and readers might do in her position—she turns to grief literature to understand and process her emotions. “Information is control,” (44) she repeats in the book. Simultaneously, she revisits fond memories with her husband and focuses her attention on caring for her sick daughter.

Though Didion makes her best attempts to process her grief, she becomes emotionally consumed; she isolates from her loved ones and refuses to let go of Dunne’s old clothes, a vicious cycle that contributes to her self-proclaimed self-pity.

Didion digs herself deeper into her melancholy by a natural human inclination towards one prevalent mode of magic. Didion denies Dunne’s death continuously in the year following the heart attack, using the tactic of “magical thinking”—the belief that her thoughts could somehow bring John back. This tactic was not actively adopted by Didion. Rather, it was a compulsion and her mind’s way of rationalizing a husband who was no longer present.

“This disordered thinking had been covert, noticed I think by no one else, hidden even from me, but it had also been, in retrospect, both urgent and constant… I realized for the first time why the obituaries had so disturbed me. I had allowed other people to think he was dead. I had allowed him to be buried alive” (35).

Eventually, she gains awareness of her tendencies toward of magical thinking and accepts that nothing could have been done to prevent Dunne’s death. As Didion approaches acceptance, she begins to write her book, which also acts as a dedication to Dunne. It begins, “As a writer… I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish…” (pg. 7). Her attempt at writing about Dunne’s death to make meaning of it would indicate the potential to resolutely complete the mourning process. However, readers of The Year of Magical Thinking do not receive a “happy ending” at the closure of the book, and instead are told that Didion’s grieving process is incomplete:

“I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us… there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let them become the photograph on the table. Let them become the name on the trust accounts. Let go of them in the water. Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of him in the water" (226).

In the act of penning her book, however, Didion does not necessarily overcome her grief entirely. She rejoins the social world and returns to her writing, while also continuously memorializing Dunne’s life. Her grief is not fully resolved. It is negotiated and renegotiated to grant oneself some sense of equanimity.

We can debate back and forth whether melancholia is a natural state of living after losing a loved one or if it is an unhealthy means of processing death. What is clearer for our purposes is that magic does not solve those wounds that are at the core of our humanity. Grief cannot be contained or managed by way of spiritual bypassing. Those dark, unprocessed feelings and thoughts will bubble up eventually, and for some, is carried until their own deaths. Grief does not discriminate, even for those who have a bit of magical thinking on their side.

Tara Yazdan Panah is an essayist from Carlsbad, CA, and an Inglenook Features Writer. She is currently based in Cambridge, MA, where she works as a teaching fellow at Harvard Divinity School.