The Feeling

As I advance Joan Didion’s memoir I communicate with her. Her writing isn’t trying to prove that she is all that, instead she speaks about her weaknesses as she experienced a moment in her life that marked her forever. As I was reading, something that impacted me was how she believed that she could “bring him back.” (37) All I kept saying to myself was that this couldn’t happen, it isn’t fiction. He’s dead. But I couldn’t stop to think that this is something common in most grieves, and I have presenced it.

Although death is a part of life, it will always be something that we don’t want to accept, or at least that’s what I believe. Questions that will always be on my mind are: what does it feel to die? When are we ready to die? Is there a chance that we know when we are going to die? Joan Didion demonstrates that we do wonder about these things when she talks about how weeks before he died, he gave all his ideas to Joan so that she would write about them. He knew that he wasn’t going to write another book. I do not know if these are just things that we start paying attention to because we analyze the events before the tragedy. But it is definitely something that made me think about the power of knowing or controlling death. For instance when my grandfather was dying he only died after my aunt arrived from the states. He was able to hold on for a little longer. How powerful are we as human beings?

Grief is the worst part about death. The people that are left behind are the ones that miss that person most, and never want to let them go. It is until we let them go, that we can start recovering, because as Joan said, grief is an illness. When Joan says that she didn’t want to give Johns shoes away because “he would need his shoes if he were to return” (37) demonstrated how Joan was in denial when her husband died. This was the same case with my grandfather’s death. My mother was in denial. When her friends called her to see how she was doing she always seemed fine, she didn’t understand why they would need to give her father’s clothes away. There were even times when she called him automatically. But it was an year later when she realized he was gone, got sad, but was able to let go.

I admire how Joan Didion published this memoir. She talks about her difficulties not only with her husband’s death, but as well dealing with her daughter’s illness. She doesn’t make herself seem heroic, instead she expresses what she was feeling, and slow and unconsciously she lets go.