Thursday, February 10, 2022

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

 I saw this in a corner and kind of looked cute with an off-white cover and title printed in Golden colour.

There was not much information about the author or the content of the book, and in the first look it looked like a self motivation kind of a book given the words printed on back of the cover "Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it end."

I am a bit biased against self help books but this one looked good given the above line and I just picked it up. A 200+ pages don't take much time.

I read the first five pages and I realised what I picked. It was a memoir recording the death of a husband and a daughter on the death bed. It had the death written all over and there were thoughts of not continuing further. Not because it is a sensitive topic but it sounded a bit intrusive as a reader.

As a rule I don't search for author or the book online if I already don't know it and when I finished it the first thing I did was to search the author. A wife couldn't do much for her husband in his last moments and a mother who was helpless in front of her comatose daughter who was in and out of ICUs.

Death is a strange event in life. The departed don't have much of a say afterwards (given a chance they wouldn't have agreed to it) but the survivors have their lives turned upside down. This is a situation for which nothing can prepare you not even witnessing multiple deaths of loved ones. Every death is a road closed in the journey of life. A road that you never believed to be closed. You expected turns, obstacles and what not but never a closure.

It was specially strange when in the last one I was reading was about someone who just wanted to let go of life and in this one they can't let go of dead. And yes they are totally different letting go. In one you are a participant and in the other you're just the observer.

Peace

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