"'The Year of Magical Thinking’ was the most overtly personal of Didion’s books,” as one of her obituary writers suggested, “but in a sense all her journalistic writing was personal. Whether the subject was Nancy Reagan, Eldridge Cleaver, Death Valley or Los Angeles freeways, her sensibility — ironic, yearning and uneasy — guided her grapplings with the outside world. Her pieces exuded what the New York Times Book Review called ‘her highly vulnerable sense of herself.’" And, now in our own, Year of Magical Thinking surrounding Didion’s passing, we must reflect upon what Didion has meant to us. As Didion aptly acknowledged in January 2004, just some two or three days after the death of her husband, "Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." In the years since, these words have become radiant truths that we all have come to understand firsthand amid a global pandemic. In making sense of her husband’s death, Didion shared the Episcopalian adage that "in the midst of life we are in death." Perhaps truer words were never written, but by returning to the work of Didion, perhaps we can make sense of our collective past and present moments and come to find again meaning in “the repeated rituals of life.” As Didion once said, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live,” and perhaps we can learn to truly live again by embracing these stories.