![]() And then when it came and I sort of started working through it, I thought that it would be over. And so I just shoved it over and kept myself from thinking about it because I had to focus on her. In my case it was put off because our daughter was sick. ![]() People often talk about grief as this thing that evolves or progresses, as if there's some healing process… The surgery did was it was supposed to, but it didn't correct the damage that was already done. In his case very specifically–he'd had open-heart surgery but damage had been done to his heart before the surgery. One of the things that we learn as we get older is that nothing that has gone wrong with us medically in our lives is never really over, you know? I mean the residue of it–it does something to you. I kept regarding it as something that had been fixed. I'd been in a lot of denial about John's cardiac condition. So it's not useful to talk about it in terms of denial, of something holding you back… I tell myself that it's not magical thinking anymore, it's that I haven't had time to do those things.īut you've let go of the idea that you can bring him back?ĭo you see the magical thinking as a sort of speed bump or detour, or did it actually help you move on?Ĭlearly it helped me get through the period, when otherwise I would have not been able to move forward. But I don't have to I mean I don't need to. I haven't actually gotten rid of his shoes. ![]() Was there some point at which you let go, and got rid of your husband's shoes? Because we don't try to treat it because we expect it to resolve itself in time. But it's the only derangement that each of them noted we don't treat. Actually both Freud and Melanie Klein described grief as a derangement. On another level I also knew that I was unhinged, that I wasn't thinking straight, which-to somebody who puts a lot of importance on thinking straight-was troubling.Ī lot of people have told me since the book came out that they went through this period of thinking they were crazy. It's a way that primitive people and not-so-primitive people try to control the world they live in.Īlthough you felt as if you were crazy, you explain that the magical thinking was a way of feeling like you had some control… When they describe a people as thinking magically they mean something along the lines of: If we make these sacrifices the crops will thrive, for example. I was really using the term "magical thinking" the way anthropologists use it. At some secret level I really thought they might discover that what had gone wrong was something so minor that they could fix it on the spot. But in some recess of my mind I had the idea-even though I've watched autopsies and know exactly what happens–I know that once an autopsy is performed even if you weren't dead before, you're dead then. Here's another example: I realized at some point that my absolute insistence that there be an autopsy was not in any way based on the idea that I didn't know what had happened. I could give away other things, but the shoes–I don't know what it was about the shoes, but a lot of people have mentioned to me that shoes took on more meaning than we generally think they do… their attachment to the ground, I don't know-but that did have a real resonance for me. I got a letter from a woman this morning who told me that she couldn't sell her husband's car because she was obsessed with the idea that he would need it when he came back. And I don't mean come back in terms of a resurrection I mean simply walk into the room. For example they are thinking–I don't know how many people have told me this–that their husband or wife will come back. One of the things that happens to people in grief is they secretly think they're crazy, because they realize they are thinking things that don't make sense.
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