Recommended: Personal essays on loss
The discussion was more emotional, as we were all moved by her writing. Didion’s style of writing resembles that of a normal thought process. She is not writing rationally, she writes about her irrational actions and thoughts. She describes herself as “demented” during her first stages of grieving (Didion 125). The way she describes John’s, her husband, death is as if she lost part of her soul when she lost him.
Therefore, Sophia is numb emotionally (Broderick & Blewitt, 2015). Thus, it is hard for Sophia to discuss Victor. A counselor must assist Sophia with understanding that grieving is a normal process after the death of a loved one. Not grieving can cause Sophia distress. According to Rudow (2011), the bereaved are at a higher risk of having a heart attack.
In the novel The Year of Magical Thinking written by Joan Didion, Joan discusses her grief due to the loss of her husband and we see a specific style where the narrator is the writer, therefore we get to read about the thoughts about the one mourning. Joan’s spoke about her relationship with her husband before he died with regret, identifying each flaw that they may have had making her, as a narrator, much more credible. She also used facts to help her understand her husband’s heart attack perhaps to help her conceive the fact that her husband really was dead. “Only after I read the autopsy report did I stop trying to reconstruct the collision, the collapse of the dead stop. The collapse had been there all along…”
Grief is a hard concept to understand. In this beginning quote the reader is given a pseudo definition of this concept but is left to interpret the rest on their own. In the “The year of magical thinking” is a memoir, written by Joan Didion, that explores this idea of loss and grief over the death of her husband, John. Joan Didion, the writer, portrays this grief and loss by writing down details of how she copes with this in a random fashion but in a strange way connects it all back to the central theme: magical thinking and grief. She uses this term magical thinking as this idea where she believes her husband is still alive and will come back.
Death is not so light a concept as to glance off of those it does not take. Oftentimes, when death claims someone close to you, it seems easy to fall into a lethargic pit of despair, contenting oneself only to dwell on the morose incontrollable nature of the universe. I know I felt this way, especially with the guilt laid upon me with the death of my brother. I do not claim to know anyone else’s grief, or to know the best way for anyone to deal with the loss of such a beloved girl. I do know, however, that “when you lose something you love, faith takes over” (Tan 2166).
The substantial influence of how individuals perceive grief in sensitive situations is significant. The perception of grief can vary greatly, with some experiencing significant life changes and others remaining in denial, unable to acknowledge the reality of their losses. In the story Blood Knots by Mallory Burton, the author develops the idea that the environment an individual is raised in has a large impact on the way they respond to grieving. In other words, the environment influences numerous factors, especially the response to grief. This ideology is evident in the short story as the way the protagonist responds to her father’s death reveals a glimpse of the environment of her upbringing and how it affected her processing the death of
Through the refusal to accept the death, those left behind create illusions to maintain the life that they have lost, at the cost of their own. People fall victim to denial-based grief due to how satisfying the thought that the person they lost is not really gone, however this is a false joy that only leaves its victims worse than before. In Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You, a mother plays with the double edged sword of denial in her dead daughter’s room, “In this room a deep ache suffuses her, as if her bones are bruised. Yet it feels good, too.
As Joan grieves, she is just like any of person, and she even goes the five stages of grief. The process a grieving person can experience is explained in a WebMD article: “The stages of grief reflect a variety of reactions that may surface as an individual tries to make sense of how a loss affects him or her” (“Stages of Grief: How to Cope With Grief and Loss”
She talks about how self pity is a natural part of the human experience of grieving, and she convinces the reader of this too. She shows the reader that this is how she copes. As a reader, or at least for me, I understand and appreciate this. This book is kind of a downer, and it can be rather technical at times, but it remains a page turner because of the great flow and smooth stories. Also, the technicality of this piece rings true to the person that you learn Didion is.
According to Broderick, Blewitt, (2015) there is no correct way to grief, everyone one deals with the loss of a loved one in their own ways. For example, recently my family has lost a member of our family, our beloved dog, Toby, died. Everyone in the family is handing Toby’s death differently, my mom and aunt and are looking at pictures of him and crying while my grandmother and I are trying to remember the good times we had, by swapping stories and experiences with him. This week I am working with a close-knit Italian-American family, which consists of Isabelle (wife/mother), Paul (oldest son), Sophia, and twins Lenore and Joseph. Recently this family has suffered the loss of Victor, the family patriarch, and Isabel's husband for 53 years.
There are multiple stages of grief and healing. The stages have no order, so one person may not be at the same stage as another when dealing with the same situation. The same thing applies to the stages of healing. In the novel “Ordinary People” by Judith Guest, the Jarrett family, Conrad, Calvin, and Beth are all in different stages of grief due to the loss of Buck and other reasons varying from character to character. The two main characters Conrad and Calvin move from stages of grief to stages of healing by recognizing why their grieving.
Magical thinking is the anthropological idea that if one performs the right actions, or hopes enough for something, their desired outcome will happen. The concept of “magical thinking” is one of the central ideas discussed in Joan Didion’s memoir The Year of Magical Thinking. This memoir explores the grief experienced by the author after losing her husband of nearly forty years. In no way does Didion try to approach death poetically, but rather honestly and practically. She bravely discusses the universal, yet rarely talked about, aspects of death, such as self pity, regret, isolation, secretly going crazy, and the phenomenon she describes as “magical thinking.”
One the consequences of an individual’s inability to effectively process and cope with a loss is prolonged grief disorder (PGD), also known as complicated grief. Individuals facing PGD are described to be stuck in a state of chronic mourning in which symptoms of acute grief do not subside but continue to interfere with normal functioning far beyond the first half year of bereavement (Spuij, Londen-Huiberts, Boelen, 2013). For the group activity we decided to use the symbolic interaction theory as our framework. Through this framework, we used the theme of “seasons” to make a symbolic connection to the understanding and forward-thinking surrounding grief and loss.
In our lives there will always be grieving in some type of form, in “ The Valley of Broken Hearts” Mrs. Joe lost her husband 13 years ago due to lung cancer. In “ New Development Stirs Old Case” the wife of Mr. Renfroe was strangled and found dead on his kitchen floor. Lastly in “French Quarter’s Black Tapping Feet” Rose suffered a great loss the loss of a parent. In every article, each individual had one thing in common they all had a heartache that dealt with death.
These aspects of the play work together to explore ideas related both to grief and acceptance. One major theme in this play is that different people grieve in different ways in order to accept a loss and be at peace. The four people at the funeral each let go of the past in their own ways.
