A Lei for Your Losses: Joan Didion on the Art of Letting Go

In an essay published Tuesday, The Marginalian revisits Joan Didion's meditations on loss from her memoir 'The Year of Magical Thinking.' Didion, who wrote the book after the death of her husband John Gregory Dunne, describes throwing a lei into the water as a ritual of release, and observes that even islands are temporary features shaped by shifting tectonic plates. The piece argues that our small daily losses—failed projects, broken plans—are training for the hardest goodbyes, and that to keep living we must eventually relinquish the dead, letting them go in the water. It's a reminder that letting go is not a single act but a lifelong practice, and that the daily deaths of hopes and plans are our scale model for life's most difficult losses.

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