Claire Donald

He's much too heavy for her.

He had had a heart attack and an instant Joan had watched it happen.

And the man she'd built her entire adult life with was gone in seconds.

Oh my God.

The chills.

Oh, for her to have to see that happen and just out of nowhere, I mean, I guess that's how heart attacks, you know, happen.

Like, shocking.

Yeah, and he wasn't just her husband.

He was her collaborator, her intellectual partner.

Meanwhile, Quintana is still alive but critically ill, and this is what makes this period especially brutal because Joan is having to start grieving her husband while simultaneously caring for her dying daughter.

Yeah.

oh my god i can't oh my god so quintana briefly improves and she is discharged from the hospital but obviously joan is like deep in grief right now and as we know the only way she can really process her grief is by writing it wasn't just about death it was about what her brain did after he died because even though she knew he was dead

she could not get rid of his shoes.

Because she was like, well, he might need them when he comes back.

Like she could not let go of his stuff.

And so she would later call her brain's refusal to accept reality, she would call it magical thinking.

And so she's begins writing the year of magical thinking in 2004.

Like that feeling where your brain just can't accept that it's

It actually happened.

Oh my gosh.