LisaLeung对《The Year of Magical Thinking》的笔记(7)

“the ordinary instant.” I saw immediately that there would be no need to add the word "ordinary," because there would be no forgetting it: the word would never left my mind. It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it.

Susanna Moore read a fragment from "East Coker," the part about how "one has only learnt to get the better of words / For the things one no longer has to say, or the way in which / One is no longer disposed to say it."

Such uncomplicated grief according to The Merck Manual, 16th Edition, could still typically present with "anxiety symptoms such as initial insomnia, restlessness, and autonomic nervous system hyperactivity," but did "not generally cause clinical depression, except in those persons inclined to mood disorder." The second kind of grief was "complicated grief," which was also known in the literature as "pathological bereavement" and was said to occur in a variety of situations. One situation in which pathological bereavement could occur, I read repeatedly, was that in which the survivor and the deceased had been unusually dependent on one another. "Was the bereaved actually very dependent upon the deceased person for pleasure, support, or esteem?" "Did the bereaved feel helpless without the lost person when enforced separations occured?"

Several years ago, walking east on Fifty-seventh Street between Sixth and Fifth Avenues on a bright fall day, I had what I believed at the time to be an apprehension of death. It was an effect of light: quick sunlight dappling, yellow leaves falling (but from what? were there even trees on West Fifty-seventh Street?), a shower of gold, spangled, very fast, a falling of the bright. Later I watched for this effect on similar bright days but never again experienced it. I wondered then if it had been a seizure, or stroke of some kind.A few years before that, in California, I had dreamed an image that, when I woke, I knew had been death: the image was that of an ice island, the jagged ridge seen from the air off one of the Channel Islands, except in this case all ice, translucent, a blued white, glittering in the sunlight. Unlike dreams in which the dreamer is anticipating death, inexorably sentenced to die but not yet there, there was in this dream no dread. Both the ice island and the fall of the bright on West Fifty-seventh Street seemed on the contrary transcendent, more beautiful I could say, yet there was no doubt in my mind that what I had seen was death.

In each of those cases the phrase "after long illness" would have seemed to apply, trailing its misleading suggestion of release, relief, resolution. In each of those long illnesses the possibility of death has been in the picture...Yet having seen the picture in no way deflected, when it came, the swift of empty loss of the actual event. It was still black and white. Each of them had been in the last instant alive, and then death.

...

Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed.

They remember the tree that die, the gull splattered onto the hood of the car.

They live by symbols. They read meanings into the barrage of spam on the unused computer, the delete key that stops working, the imagined abandonment in the decision to replace it.

...

John had written in Harp: " coming directly from a doctor's appointment in Santa Monica, and as I sat there under the hot August sun, death was very much on my mind. I thought Anton had actually died under the best possible circumstances for him, a moment of terror as he realized the inevitable outcome of the accident, then an instant later the enternal dark.

“It's good luck, an omen, a great way to start this trip,” I remembered John saying. He did not mean the good seats and he did not mean the Laker win and he did not mean the rain, he meant we were doing something we did not ordinarily do, which had become an issue with him.We were not having any fun, he had recently begun pointing out.I would take exception (didn't we do this, didn't we do that) but I had also known what he meant. He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them but because we wanted to do them. He meant wanting. He meant living.

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 a imagined death. We misconsture the nature of even those few days or weeks.We might expect that if the death is suddenly to feel shock.We do not expect that this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind.We might except 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 centain forward movement will prevail. The wrost 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 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.

We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, 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.

I did not want to finish the year because I know that as the days pass, as January becomes February and February becomes summer, certain things will happen. My image of John at the instant of his death will become less immediate, less raw. It will become something that happened in another year. My sense of John himself, John alive, will become more remote, even “mudgy,” softened, transmuted into whatever best serves my life without him

...

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.

...

Leis go brown, tectonic plates shift, deep currents move, islands vanish, rooms get forgotten.

You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change.