"She won several Lifetime Achievement Awards, and in 2006, she was a Pulitzer finalist for her 2005 memoir “The Year Of Magical Thinking,” about the death of her husband, John Dunne, and her subsequent mourning."
"Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
The question of self-pity.
Those were the first words I wrote after it happened.
For a long time I wrote nothing else.
Life changes in the instant.
The ordinary instant.
Didion says: "At
some point, in the interest of remembering what seemed most striking
about what had happened, I considered adding those words, "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 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. I recognize now that there was
nothing unusual in this: confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on
how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable
occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine
errand that ended on the shoulder with the car in flames, the swings
where the children were playing as usual when the rattlesnake struck
from the ivy. He was on his way home from work -- happy, ..."
Didion's most profound statement "And then -- gone." "In the midst of life we are in death, ..."
My Comment: Rest in Peace, Joan Didion. Finally your quest
for a peace is upon you perhaps what you never knew in life.
More of Joan Didion: https://www.npr.org/templates/
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