I read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking 20 years ago. I have never forgotten it and I want to start with a quote from what is a superb book about grief.
I began. I cleared a shelf on which John had stacked sweatshirts, T-shirts, the clothes he wore when we walked in Central Park in the early morning. We walked every morning. We did not always walk together because we liked different routes but we would keep the other’s route in mind and intersect before we left the park. The clothes on this shelf were as familiar to me as my own. I closed my mind to this. I set aside certain things (a faded sweatshirt I particularly remembered him wearing, a Canyon Ranch T-shirt Quintana had brought him from Arizona), but I put most of what was on this shelf into bags and took the bags across the street to St. James’ Episcopal Church. Emboldened, I opened a closet and filled more bags: New Balance sneakers, all-weather shoes, Brooks Brothers shorts, bag after bag of socks. I took the bags to St. James’. One day a few weeks later I gathered up more bags and took them to John’s office, where he had kept his clothes. I was not yet prepared to address the suits and shirts and jackets but I thought I could handle what remained of the shoes, a start.
I stopped at the door to the room.
I could not give away the rest of his shoes.
I stood there for a moment, then realized why: he would need shoes if he was to return.
The recognition of this thought by no means eradicated the thought.
I have still not tried to determine (say, by giving away the shoes) if the thought has lost its power.
There was once a woman who suddenly lost her husband, and he had had some large responsibilities at his job that put the family into a spotlight. Because her family had caught the imagination of the world she knew her reaction to the tragedy would be amplified so she shut her life down from public scrutiny and moved her family out of the public eye.
She and her family were not perfect. But she realized the tragedy of her loss and said: “So, now, he is a legend when he would have preferred to be a man.”
There was once another widow who suddenly lost her husband, and he was unknown apart from a distinct circle of followers. When he died she decided to try to turn him from a man into a legend. She was hampered by a few things: neither of them had ever done anything of note, anything selfless, anything inspiring. All they had was a pulsing hatred of anyone that didn’t want to worship them.
So that’s what the second widow marketed: that she was even better hater than her spouse. She took her private grief and poured it as an accelerant on her hate so it would be extra sparkly. There were lots of fireworks and hair extensions and sequins. She began endorsing people who might not hate as strongly as she did, but who could persuade voters and donors that they sincerely believed the same ideas they openly hated just a few years ago.
The second widow fed off the anger of her supporters who believed that she deserved the status of the first widow even though neither she nor her husband had sacrificed anything, and neither was known outside of their weirdo subculture of a larger weirdo subculture. But shared anger can be a strong binder. And goodness knows there’s a lot of money to be made off of it. And you can only pimp a corpse for so long.
I’ll leave you with this: