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A review by jenniey3
Blue Nights by Joan Didion
4.0
The blue nights are the calm before the storm; it is an ephemeral state of being utterly frozen mere feet away from the eye of a tornado, full well knowing havoc will be wreaked in moments. Joan Didion details the life and aftermath of her daughter’s death at thirty-nine years of age. She talks about what it is like to be a parent, how it is like living with your heart outside of your body, how it feels like being constantly afraid of everything that may potentially harm your child, and how parenthood is the struggle of balancing the child’s independence and dependence.
Mortality is a state we will all come face to face with sometime down the line. At a certain age, we are conscious of our own frailty, and it becomes obvious that it is not just what we have lost that clouds our heads with fear. It is the knowledge that we still have so much to lose, the knowledge that we will soon lose it all. The immutable fact of life is that it serves us all humility on a silver platter no matter our perceived privileges.
Many devices can kill a man, yet none so excruciating as the grief that comes with losing a child. None so excruciating as the loss of our own flesh and blood, removed pound for pound from our own souls, crushing our windpipes and cutting us off at our knees, until the remnants of our pain can only be seen in the dark shadows under our eyes. And when a friend asks how we are doing, all we can muster is a half-hearted “I just didn’t sleep well last night.”
Mortality is a state we will all come face to face with sometime down the line. At a certain age, we are conscious of our own frailty, and it becomes obvious that it is not just what we have lost that clouds our heads with fear. It is the knowledge that we still have so much to lose, the knowledge that we will soon lose it all. The immutable fact of life is that it serves us all humility on a silver platter no matter our perceived privileges.
Many devices can kill a man, yet none so excruciating as the grief that comes with losing a child. None so excruciating as the loss of our own flesh and blood, removed pound for pound from our own souls, crushing our windpipes and cutting us off at our knees, until the remnants of our pain can only be seen in the dark shadows under our eyes. And when a friend asks how we are doing, all we can muster is a half-hearted “I just didn’t sleep well last night.”