good grief

I picked up a copy of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking Saturday morning, many months removed from the flurry of press that surrounded the book when it was released last fall. When a book gets that much attention it usually makes me actively not want to read it, for fear of falling prey to the hype machine that so often makes a sensation out of excrement. Not so with this nonfiction wonder, a winner of the National Book Award. Didion writes in a chillingly clear tone about the sudden death of her writer husband, an event made all the more harrowing by her only daughter's concurrent collapse into a coma. It's a hard book to read. Absorbing it on the couch Saturday afternoon, I kept sighing and groaning. The BF finally made me stop and go read in the other room.

I guess you could say the timing of this purchase was cosmic. Saturday night, my mother called to tell me that my grandmother had died. We knew it was just a matter of days until her passing; she'd suffered three major strokes last week and was nonresponsive. My mother was calm when she told me the news, much like Didion in the book after doctors let her know that John had died of a massive coronary. Mom cried a little at the end of the phone call, but has been, as Joan writes, "one cool customer" throughout this whole ordeal.

It's fascinating to note how different people deal with death. In the book, Didion digs into the literature of grief and finds that the way society faces mortality has changed in the past hundred years. She quotes an Emily Post book of etiquette from 1922, which gives detailed instructions on the care surrounding funerals and the requisite period of mourning.

No one speaks of mourning anymore. Didion says this is a cultural change that happened in the middle part of the last century, when there arose "an ethical duty to enjoy oneself" and not be bogged down by depression. I'd argue that imperative has increased tenfold in today's Zoloft-fueled zeitgeist, when any hint of gloom is taken to indicate illness.

I'm not so much sad about my grandmother's passing. She had Alzheimer's and hadn't really been herself in years. We were never close even before then, not like I was close with my other set of grandparents or with her late husband, who died when I was a child. I'll be going home for the funeral tomorrow night, with Magical Thinking in mind.