Pathological Bereavement

Acrylic / 24" x 30"

”“Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of ‘waves.’

Eric Lindemann, who was chief of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital in the 1940s and interviewed many family members of those killed in the 1942 Cocoanut Grove fire, defined the phenomenon with absolute specificity in a famous 1944 study: ‘sensations of somatic distress occurring in waves lasting from twenty minutes to an hour at a time, a feeling of tightness in the throat, choking with shortness of breath, need for sighing, and an empty feeling in the abdomen, lack of muscular power, and an intense subjective distress described as tension or mental pain.’”

- The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion

Acrylic / 12" x 36"

“There had come a point... when it had occurred to me that I was supposed to give John’s clothes away... It was part of what people did after a death, part of the ritual, some kind of duty.

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 Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion

Acrylic / 18" x 36"

“Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be...

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.”

- The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion

 Acrylic / 22" x 28"

“People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness. It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist’s office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off.

These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible. I myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal. I seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead, entered a place in which I could be seen only by those who were themselves recently bereaved.”

- The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion

 Acrylic / 20" diameter

“I notice that I have lost the skills for ordinary social encounters, however undeveloped those skills may have been, that I had a year ago... I found conversation with others difficult.

On such occasions I hear myself trying to make an effort and failing.”

- The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion

Acrylic / 24" x 24"

“I cannot count the days on which I found myself driving abruptly blinded by tears.”

- The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion

Acrylic / 18" x 36"

“I did not believe in the resurrection of the body but I still believed that given the right circumstances he would come back.”

- The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion

Acrylic / 22" x 28"

“Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.”

- The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion

Acrylic / 24" x 36"

“People in grief think a great deal about self-pity. We worry it, dread it, scourge our thinking for signs of it. We fear that our actions will reveal the condition tellingly described as ‘dwelling on it.’ We understand the aversion most of us have to ‘dwelling on it.’ Visible mourning reminds us of death, which is construed as unnatural, a failure to manage the situation...

We remind ourselves repeatedly that our own loss is nothing compared to the loss experienced (or, the even worse thought, not experienced) by he or she who died; this attempt at corrective thinking serves only to plunge us deeper into the self-regarding deep.”

- The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion

Acrylic / 24" x 36"

“I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.

I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.

Let them become the photograph on the table.

Let them become the name on the trust accounts.

Let go of them in the water.”

- The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion