We are not idealised wild things.
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…
I remember despising the book Dylan Thomas’s widow Caitlin wrote after her husband’s death, Leftover Life to Kill. I remember being dismissive of, even censorious about, her ‘self-pity’, her ‘whining’, her ‘dwelling on it.’ Leftover Life to Kill was published in 1957. I was twenty-two years old. Time is the school in which we learn.
(Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking.)
