“a place none of us know until we reach it”

Susan Sontag wrote,

Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.

Sontag went to that “other place” when she was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 1977 and she wrote about it in her now classic essay, “Illness as Metaphor.” She returned to that kingdom of the sick in 1998 and before she died in December 2004.

In last weekend’s New York Times Magazine, Joan Didion shared with readers a selection from her forthcoming book, The Year of Magical Thinking in which she describes her entrance into the kingdom of grief.

Grief, Didion tells us, is different from the sadness she felt when each of her elderly parents died.

What I felt in each instance was sadness, loneliness (the loneliness of the abandoned child of whatever age), regret for time gone by, for things unsaid, for my inability to share or even in any real way to acknowledge, at the end, the pain and helplessness and physical humiliation they each endured. I understood the inevitability of each of their deaths. I had been expecting (fearing, dreading, anticipating) those deaths all my life. They remained, when they did occur, distanced, at a remove from the ongoing dailiness of my life.

There is no distance from grief, from the immediacy of a partner’s sudden death.

Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. . . . [Grief is] a place none of us know until we reach it.

Didion’s book is reviewed in January Magazine by our Health Advocacy Program assistant, Emily Macel, a student in the graduate writing program at Sarah Lawrence. Emily contextualizes this memoir within illness narrative writing, and describes its impact on the reader, drawn into the “vortex” by Didion’s compelling prose.