The Year of Magical Thinking (Vintage International)

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order 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 go, keep them dead.

if death catches us we have only ourselves to blame.

so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.

Marriage is memory, marriage is time.

grief feels like suspense,”

For me to imagine what he could say only in my edit would seem obscene, a violation.

Visible mourning reminds us of death, which is construed as unnatural, a failure to manage the situation.

In fact the grieving have urgent reasons, even an urgent need, to feel sorry for themselves.

In my unexamined mind there was always a point, John’s and my death, at which the tracks would converge for a final time.