She writes so beautifully you just glide along her story. Such a heart wrenching thing to write about. She so put herself out there for all of us to read about. Illness, death, loss, grief, bearing it all. I haven't lost a spouse as she has nor a child which I don't even want to imagine. But grief, I know. There were so many parts that I totally understood and related to. How after someone close to you passes you live on relating everything to that last one. Last month today we were...., last year today we were... How one minute you are in the present and the next minute you are flashing back to you last days/hours and then back further to some arbitrary memory. You go back and forth with her and yet are never lost in time but feel suspended in her reality as she deals with her grief and then you remember how it happened to you like that too.
You get up and do what you are supposed to do and then for a snippet forget the person isn't here anymore because any day you would have done this on your own and then you get to the part where you would have called/seen/spoken to that person and realize now what? They aren't here. There's no one to tell, no one to show, no one to care. Eventually, you find that others do care but not the same way because well, they are someone else aren't they. Special in their own right but not the same. Then you flash back and forth and keep going again and again and again.
Do you ever stop grieving? I don't know. My mother's been gone forever and I still have moments when I realize that I can't pick up the phone and just tell her something. I still cry when my kids do something that she would have loved to see and she's missed it. I still talk about her and refer to things that she would have liked or comments that she would have made. Yet, at the same time I realize that she's not here and when I look up to the heavens and talk to "whoever is driving my bus" I direct my thoughts to her as if she were riding shotgun and has some say as to which direction the bus will go.
But back to the book. I already passed it on to someone else and would recommend it for reading. It was comforting to read that Didion went thru some of the same things that I have and we still keep on keepin' on.
1 comment:
I look forward to reading book and understand what you mean. My father's been gone for 4 years (is that even possible?) and still - albeit less frequently than before - I will reach for the phone to call him when I read something he's be interested in, or that he would know about and be able to explain to me. And then I remember he's gome - and it hurts. A lot. Still.
I hope I can get through the book, but I'm a little afraid. That piece of me is still raw, I'm afraid it will hurt too much.
I'll let you know.
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