Before coming to Yale and just after Wuhan went into lockdown due to rising COVID-19 cases, I bought my first Joan Didion book. It was “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” Although I remember few details of what I read, I do recall the nature of her prose, arresting and alluring. I wanted more. More Didion.

As soon as I was done with “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” I got my hands on “The Year of Magical Thinking,” Didion’s account of life in the wake of her husband’s death. But the tight grip her prose had once held on me loosened. It now felt cold and alienating. Maybe it was because reading about her grief and her husband’s death ultimately felt intrusive. I put the book back in my bookshelf, leaving it to collect dust.

At the time, the COVID-19 pandemic was still in its infancy. Everything still felt normal. I had little idea of just how much the world had already changed and how much it would change.

After Didion’s passing in late December, however, I felt compelled to revisit her work. And for the first time since early 2020, I picked up “The Year of Magical Thinking.” From the moment I held it, it already felt heavier. I cannot explain why, but it did. As I re-read the opening chapters, the book resonated with me in a way it never could have before the pandemic.

Modernity, Didion tells us, banished death from the public imagination. Citing the English anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer, she adds that an increasingly entrenched societal inclination towards an “ethical duty to enjoy oneself” left little room for the more somber and morose dimensions of human emotion. 

We have all been affected differently by the pandemic. Some of us have lost relatives and friends, others of us have not. If you have not personally lost anyone to COVID-19, it feels melodramatic to experience grief and self-centered to mourn. At least that’s how I felt. But at some level or another, the COVID-19 pandemic has plunged us all into some state of collective grief. Regardless of whether it feels justified or not, selfish or not, it is still there. How could it not be? Death and illness permeate the air, ordinary life is unfamiliar, and the injustice of the inequitable distribution of testing kits, vaccines and medical resources weighs heavy on the conscience.

Yet, to quote Didion, our collective grief feels as if it is “hidden from view.” Where are the public memorials? Where are the spaces for us to join hands as mourners? Where do we grieve?

In the 20th century, Didion writes, the stoic bereaver came to be commended, while prolonged mourning came to be condemned as taboo and a self-indulgent practice. It became a lost tradition. Perhaps it is time to reclaim it.

Over the course of her writing in “The Year of Magical Thinking,” Didion came to recognize mourning as a remedy for grief. When I read this, I was taken aback. For, I held the opposite to be true: mourning compounded grief. It dug the hole deeper, and made it harder to get out.

As we seek to reckon — if it even is possible to have such a reckoning — with the human toll of the COVID-19 pandemic, we would do well to heed Didion’s words. Bliss will not be found in ignorance. She points us to mourning as a practice which can help us grapple with grief, the nature of death and the memory of the dead. We should give ourselves the space to mourn, publicly and privately, to recognize our grief and to know that it is okay to do so. It is okay.

Only then, can we begin to come to terms with how we will remember those who have died from COVID-19, how we will memorialize their lives and what moving forward means.

Dylan Carlson Sirvent Léon is a sophomore in Pauli Murray College.  Contact him at dylan.carlson@yale.edu