Near the beginning of The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion promises that you will experience what she did in your lifetime. Specifically, she was referring to the feeling of disbelief following the death of someone dear. For example, following the sudden death of her husband, she described feeling that as long as she thought certain ways or didn’t acknowledge certain things, her husband would come back. She knew he was dead today but wondered, “What about tomorrow?” She saved her husband’s shoes with the thought that he would need them when he came back.
I can believe her promise and relate to her sentiment. Even five years later, it doesn’t seem real that I’ll never see my mom again. My cat Jiji passed away in June this year. I held on to a box of food I bought for her for months. I still have a baggy of her medications in a closet. These things are “special” in some way, a part of her, and can’t merely be thrown away.