The Year of Magical Thinking
As I read Joan Didion’s memoir of the year following her husband’s sudden death in 2003, this passage kept coming to mind:
“Brothers, we do not want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep, or to grieve like the rest of men, who have no hope. We believe that Jesus died and rose again and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. According to the Lord’s own word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left till the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage each other with these words.
1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 NIV
Those words stood out in stark contrast to this section from The Year of Magical Thinking:
“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. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes. In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be “healing.” A certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days. We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place. When we anticipate the funeral we wonder about failing to “get through it,” rise to the occasion, exhibit the “strength” that invariably gets mentioned as the correct response to death. We anticipate needing to steel ourselves for the moment: will I be able to greet people, will I be able to leave the scene, will I be able even to get dressed that day? We have no way of knowing that this will not be the issue. We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.”
I’m sure the emotions and experiences she writes of in this passage are common to people who have lost someone that close to them. In the passage in 1 Thessalonians, Paul doesn’t say “I don’t want you to grieve.” He says, “I don’t want you to grieve like those who have no hope.” It’s the last sentence in Didion’s passage that seems to be so hopeless: “…the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaningless itself.”
Although Ms. Didion considers herself an Episcopalian and her husband John Dunne a Catholic, she flatly states that she does not believe in the resurrection in the body. She has no hope of seeing her husband again. After being married almost 40 years, it’s horrifying to realize that your partner in life is gone and you will never be in their presence again. It’s surprising to me that more people don’t go insane from grief.
In Ms. Didion’s book, I noticed two main differences in the grief experienced by believers and the grief experienced by nonbelievers. The first is this hopelessness. If we are Christians, the goodbye we say to a fellow believer who dies is, in fact, a “see you later.” We have the hope of the resurrection, and that makes all the difference.
The second contrast I noticed is in the belief that grief must not be given into, it must be “handled.” I think I understand why. If you have no hope, it must be better to push the grief aside and not experience it. There is no hope, and therefore the grief would be heavy enough to destroy a person.
When my friend Beve died last year, we grieved. I saw people cry and laugh and then cry again. I didn’t get the sense that anyone was suppressing their feelings and just “handling” it. We knew that we could grieve and mourn and experience the loss of Beve’s presence, and yet that wasn’t the end. We weren’t sad for her. She hadn’t entered the “eternal dark” as Ms. Didion quotes her husband as describing death. Beve had entered eternal light! Knowing this – and that we would one day be there with her – gave us hope.
As I finished the book and read the last sentence, in which Ms. Didion mentions her belief that “no eye is on the sparrow,” I found myself sad for her. I don’t know her personally, but I pray that one day she will find the hope that is Jesus, and the knowledge that this life is not all there is.
