I’m leaning against a utility pole, trying to take advantage of a weird mid-afternoon reflected light that falls on sheets of plywood covering a broken window pane. Last year, the business owner covered these same windows with plywood out of fear for Black Lives Matter riots that never materialized. This year, the owner has no choice because somebody lost their shit and went on a smashing spree all the way down the street. I don’t know the story, but it doesn’t require a great leap to imagine what happened and why. A year and a half into this and it could easily be me who decides he can’t take it any more and needs to smash some windows.
I’ve set up my shot and I start photographing people as they pass through the frame. I’m not a subtle person and I make no effort to hide what I’m doing. But people don’t seem to care. Maybe they feel overwhelmed by life and I present them with one more thing they don’t have the energy to care about.
Afterwards, when I’m processing my photos, one stands out above the others. An older man—perhaps 70—walks past. Like most, he wears a mask. In his right hand, he carries a book. When I zoom in for a closer look, I see that it is Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking.
I read this book a couple years ago, taking it up without knowing beforehand what it was about. As with most books by Didion, I read it straight through, and when I was done, I made a mental bookmark. I said to myself: should the time come and one of my parents finds themselves bereft, I’ll give them this book. Or, god forbid, should my wife predecease me, then I will lean on Didion myself. The Year of Magical Thinking is Didion’s account of her husband’s death and of her grief. She reminds us that if we are to live fully, then grief and loss must necessarily be a part of that living.
I look again at the man and wonder why he is reading the book. Maybe, like me, he’s a book nerd and reads because he’s on a Didion jag. But it’s just as likely that he’s grieving and looks to Didion for sustenance. There could well be a story here and we have the merest traces of it.
Or…
I return again to the image and wonder if an older man wearing a mask and carrying a book about grief isn’t emblematic of our times. During the pandemic, there are ways in which we all have experienced loss. For some of us, this loss has been traumatic and acute. For others of us, this loss has been cumulative, sometimes creeping over us unawares. However we characterize our loss, we have all experienced it in one form or another and inevitably it has evoked feelings of grief. We are all entitled to our sadness and our anger, our anxiety and our moments of magical thinking. And we all deserve to have wise companions like Didion to accompany us on our way.
See also David G. Hallman’s August Farewell for another memoir of grief.