Magical Thinking

Last weekend was commencement at the University where I teach. One of my students, a very smart, committed young woman named Emily Zametkin, graduated and headed out into the world. She's been accepted into the Peace Corps. Earlier in the spring, just after my son Jeff died, Emily sent me a card along with a copy The Year of Magical Thinking, the book in which Joan Didion recounts her reaction to the death of her husband. This was, I believe, an incredibly sensitive and insightful gift. Thanks again Emily!

I finished the book this evening. In some ways Didion drives me crazy with her ability to insinuate the pretensions of New York intellectuals into her reflections. (Do we really care that she and her late husband had copies of Daedalus lying around the living room?) But she is a very good writer and also quite astute observer of the transformations and intricacies of her own cognitive and emotional states over the course of the year. In the final pages Didion writes this passage:

"I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to
keep them alive to keep them with us.

I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a
point at which we must relinquish the dead.

Let them become a photograph on the table."

Well, I know that Didion is right. But I am not sure how that can happen even though I know it will, somehow, someday. I have a wonderful photograph of Jeffrey but I don't see how he might become that photograph. Indeed, it seems to me like magical thinking to imagine the day he might become that photograph instead of the photograph being of him. There are lots of days ahead.