Fear

I've just finished reading The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. It is a book on how a wife copes in the first years after losing her husband of 40 years. This is something I cannot imagine, much less consider writing about with any clarity. I found these passages toward the end of the book to be especially poignant.

"I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response. I read something in the paper that I would normally have read to him. I notice some change in the neighborhood that would interest him...I recall coming in from Central Park one morning in mid-August with urgent news to report...I am dropping my keys on the table inside the door before I fully remember. There is no one to hear this news, nowhere to go with the unmade plan, the uncompleted thought."

"Marriage is memory, marriage is time. Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time. For forty years I saw myself through John's eyes. I did not age. This year for the first time since I was twenty-nine I saw myself through the eyes of others. This year for the first time since I was twenty-nine I realized that my image of myself was of someone significantly younger."

And this, my friends, is why I am terrified of getting married. I'm not sure I could handle the loss.