Predicting our future - Essay Example

She further explains that we never know what our future has in store for us. Didion goes on to say what is surprising is that sometimes we seldom remember the details of the event which changes our life in a minute or we remember the incident quite vividly as it happened just yesterday. Joan Didion lost her husband suddenly on the evening of December 30, 2003 when he had a heart attack. Her daughter was also admitted in a hospital because her pneumonia had worsened. The couple had returned from the hospital and she was getting the dinner ready.

The author writes each and every detail systematically as if the event has been imprinted on her mind. For instance, she says, “We had come home. We had discussed whether to go out for dinner or eat in. I said I would build a fire, we could eat in. I built the fire, I started dinner, I asked John if he wanted a drink.” This implies the fact that the incident had left such an impact on her that she even remembered minute details of that day. She writes that everything was ordinary as they had been following this routine for the last twenty four years of their life.

But in the next instant, she explains “John was talking, and then he wasn’t”. . t comes in “waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.” The author wrote that she could not accept the fact that everything had happened so fast. Though she used to interview people who had been in accidents and traumatic events, she could not somehow, make up her mind that her husband had really died. When she woke up in the morning after her husband’s death, she thought that she had fought with him and that is why he was not in the bed.

But seconds later, her mind triggered the events and then everything came back rushing to her mind. She compares the grief of her husband’s death to her parent’s death. She says that when her mother died, she was regretful that she had not spent more time with them. But in a way she had been expecting their death in the near future because they both had been in their late 90s. But what she felt in her husband’s case was more painful and more overwhelming. She says this was because it was a sudden death and she was not expecting that this would about to happen.

“One moment he had been there-and the next he was gone”. This suddenness added to her grief and she could not come to terms with it. She had not been expecting everything to change so fast. He was her life partner, her soul mate, and her friend and so she says it was not easy to let go of everything. For a year almost she kept on imagining him everywhere and everything around used to remind her of him. She says grief is nothing that can be imagined. One only knows of it once he has experienced it.

It is clear that people one loves will eventually die. However, nobody envisions how life would be without them. Even if someone does think of that, it is not what actually happens. If one thinks