But here, in Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, loss is absolutely, irrevocably about death.

After spending the day visiting their daughter in the hospital, Joan and John return home for a peaceful, quiet night. Joan starts a fire, fixes John a drink, and prepares dinner. As she sits down to the table, John stops speaking, slumps over, and dies. Later, after I married and had a child, I learned to find equal meaning in the repeated rituals of domestic life. Setting the table. Lighting the candles. Building the fire. Cooking. All those soufflés, all that crème caramel, all those daubes and albóndigas and gumbos. . . These fragments I have shored against my ruins. . .i98681953 |b1100040421692 |dmvfh |g- |m |h4 |x1 |t0 |i3 |j18 |k150830 |n02-24-2023 20:02 |o- |aB GRA

The book I read contained updates at the end of each chapter. At times the updated sections weren't clearly separated from the body of the "old" text and I wasn't sure if I was reading a current narrative or a slightly outdated one. That combined with the sometimes-repetitiveness of Temple's narrative led to a few moments when I wasn't sure where I was at in the book. I did appreciate the updates, though. They made the text more modern and touched upon some new topics in autism research. Pe cînd stau la masă, într-o seară, după ce și-au vizitat fiica, Quintana Roo, la spital, soțul lui Joan Didion se prăbușește fără suflare. O moarte subită, vor declara medicii. Temple described fully how the fear impulses that autistic people feel are much like the same fear impulses that cattle and animals feels. Animals flee when they see predators. Cattle and sheep have supersensitive hearing. High-pitched sounds are disturbing to them. The same kinds of sounds that upset cattle are the same kinds of sounds that are unbearable to many autistic children with overly sensitive hearing.

Joan Didion e il marito John Gregory Dunne, nato a Hartford; Connecticut, il 25 maggio 1932, morto a New York il 30 dicembre 2003. You have to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He [John] told me that. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that. I highlighted several passages and was often in awe of the way she views life events, in a highly educated, classical sort of way.