Essayist and novelist Joan Didion was already scheduled to speak at the Y on Wednesday, October 19 when we came across an excerpt from her new book, The Year of Magical Thinking, in the New York Times Magazine.

The excerpt, from the chapter After Life, is a chronicle of Didion’s struggles with mortality, depression and everyday life following the death of her husband and daughter within two years of each other. It’s a moving piece of personal memoir that took considerable nerve on Didion’s part to write:

Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of “waves.” Erich Lindemann, who was chief of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital in the 1940s and interviewed many family members of those killed in the 1942 Cocoanut Grove fire, defined the phenomenon with absolute specificity in a famous 1944 study: “sensations of somatic distress occurring in waves lasting from 20 minutes to an hour at a time, a feeling of tightness in the throat, choking with shortness of breath, need for sighing and an empty feeling in the abdomen, lack of muscular power and an intense subjective distress described as tension or mental pain.”

Tightness in the throat.

Choking, need for sighing.

Such waves began for me on the morning of December 31, 2003, seven or eight hours after the fact, when I woke alone in the apartment.