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Life Happens in the Instant
When life meets the intersection of joy and grief.
Kristina Khodai
September 18, 2024
Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it changes.
I first read the The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion in 2021 at the start of my final semester of graduate school. At the time, I had spent the previous year pulling myself through a series of events that included nearly losing my mom, finishing my bachelor’s degree sitting alone in my college apartment, saying goodbye to my childhood home, and generally existing in an unprecedented version of life that was the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Year of Magical Thinking left a permanent imprint on my heart and my life. It’s an imprint I can return to for comfort, one that reminds me that everyone you know is dealing with something unimaginably painful at any given time. Didion details the intensely personal experience of her only daughter falling ill and into a coma and then losing her husband to a heart attack while sitting at the kitchen table only a few days later. She explores loss, grief, illness, and the way humans attempt to make sense of it all. That line about life happening in the instant — the first line of the first chapter — has stuck with me especially. When life seems to happen out of nowhere, I remember it is life’s tendency to knock down your door when you’re just cleaning your room or watching TV or running an errand or sitting down at the kitchen table for dinner.
And if there’s anything I’ve learned in the past four years, it’s that life doesn’t wait. It doesn’t wait for the weekend or for you to finish folding your laundry or for you to nail down all the details in your itinerary. Life does not care that you made plans months in advance or that you’re not ready or you’re about to graduate from college or your wedding is only in a few months. It does not care that you need more time; you will always need more time. It will rush in at full speed, switch things around, and leave you wondering if you ever had a grasp on it to begin with.
Life has happened to me in many more ways since I first found Didion’s words. I finished graduate school, moved to another state, got married, and adopted a kitten. I’ve noticed that people tend to highlight all the good milestones that happen to them — marriage, moves, pets, kids — while subtly leaving out or grazing over the uglier parts. But isn’t it really all those ugly sides of life that end up leaving the biggest marks on us?
The intricacies of life — the good, the bad, and the in between — happen everywhere and all at once. Our loved ones pass away, babies are born, friends move away, new friends are made, you lose your job, you find your passion, you get your heart broken ten times and then fall in love all over again. We don’t get to pick and choose the timelines, even when we do our best to plan.
Exactly two years ago, I wrote the following journal entry. After over a month in the hospital and a rehabilitation center with a serious infection, my dad was finally discharged and sent home with my mom and I. Oh, and my wedding was less than a month away! But even then, I knew that two things can be true at the same time. In fact, those two journal pages in the image up top — one with a series of visitor pass stickers from the end of August and one with the receipt from getting our marriage license — illustrate this in a very physical sense.
September 18, 2022
“There have been nights this year where I sang along to my favorite songs surrounded by my favorite people. And I thought then, that these are some of the best times of my life. But then there are times when I am crying all the way home, sobbing into my coffee, into the arms of my love. And those days I swore, these are the worst days of my life. And maybe that’s all true. I will keep having these best and worst days for certain. But I know I will look back at this time and notice how deeply entwined all the good and the bad has been. How in the same moment I am deciding on my hairstyle for the wedding or finalizing day-of details, I am also getting calls from the nurse about Dad’s progress. How there were days when we were so exhausted and overwhelmed that it felt like we were working against each other. And then in the same breath of frustration comes a breath of humor to cut the air in the room, laughing at something that probably wasn’t even that funny. But it is better than the tears.
I know that the days ahead are long, but I also know that I will be walking down the aisle with my parents on each side of me. I know that even if it’s not how we pictured it, we will all be drunk with joy and champagne and a break in the seemingly never-ending stint of hospitals and doctor’s appointments and pill bottles. We will all go home tired but happy. And the hard days ahead will seem so far away. And before we know it, the next best thing will be around the corner waiting.”
Although I didn’t understand so many things back then, I knew that I could simultaneously be experiencing great struggles while feeling enormous amounts of love. I knew tears could hold any kind of meaning from day to day, from moment to moment. I knew that I would look back on that time in my life exactly the way I do now — seeing the pain our family went through, but more than that, seeing the strength, love, and grace that so many people lifted us up with.
There have been many best things around the corner since then. Life continues to happen in the ordinary instant in both pain and joy, day in and day out. Don’t be afraid to let the light in, to feel the happy times in their entirety rather than waiting for it to end. Nearly nothing in life is certain, and surely everything we have is temporary. It’s a gift to be here for it all.
And if you’re going through something difficult right now, I hope you know that you don’t have to wait for grief to be over before you experience joy again.
xo, Kristina
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