Self-portrait with white mask and red coat

Joan Didion died today. 

She had enormous privilege and terrible grief. Her husband and daughter died before her. Because she was a writer, she wrote about grief.  

“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.”—The Year of Magical Thinking.

She warns, “It will happen to you.”

She was right about that.