techno-culture

One of the joys of last year’s Dublin Theatre Festival for me was seeing Vanessa Redgrave in the stage adaption of Joan Didion’s autobiographical The Year of Magical Thinking. Redgrave was riveting in the moving story of Didion’s refusal to accept that her husband had died, during the period of  the sudden hospitalisation and then eventual death of her only daughter as well. One of Didion’s powerful lines, delivered by Redgrave to the packed theatre, was to the effect that while the audience might feel suffering this horrific level of grief was someone else’s story, it was only because they had not yet felt it themselves. I couldn’t stop thinking about the awful irony of Redgrave experiencing a similar, sudden, devastating loss with her daughter Natasha Richardson this week, so soon after so masterfully taking on that one-woman show. I hope she could somehow draw some inner support from having absorbed Didion’s book and made it her own.

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We know that someone close to us could die. We might expect to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind.