Joan Didion

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.

The Doors seemed unconvinced that love was brotherhood and the Kama Sutra. The Doors’ music insisted that love was sex and sex was death and therein lay salvation.

In time of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control.

After that instant at the dinner table he was never not dead.

As I recall this I realize how open we are to the persistent message that we can avert death.

What had encouraged us to think that a resort hotel in Honolulu was the place to solve a cash shortfall?

What lesson did we take from the fact that it worked?

Why did I think that this improvisation could never end?

If I had seen that it could, what would I have done differently?

What would he?

cognitive deficits that came with either stress or grief, but I remained unsettled. Would I ever be right again? Could I ever again trust myself not to be wrong?

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

It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it