I’ll have to come back to this book later when I’ve lost someone.

The book in that sentence is Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. The I in that sentence preparing for unknown yet certain losses is, of course, me. I was just sixteen, reading and journaling on a beach towel in my backyard, laying belly down with my bikini top off, hoping the tanning oil was making me good and bronze. I was sixteen, tanning in the backyard, and simultaneously stocking my mental fallout shelter like a prepper might stock up on canned tomatoes.

There are plenty of essays in which young women rhapsodize Didion. I love to read This is not one of them. I am concerned not with Didion herself, but with something Didion-adjacent. I am concerned about the way time collapses. The ways in which a sixteen-year-old can accurately predict she will need to return to Didion’s grief opus  – that she will become intimate with magical thinking.

I returned to the book just this spring – my twenty-fifth one – on the one-year anniversary of Maxine’s murder.

Maxine was going to be my mother-in-law once I married her son. I thought of her as a mother-in-spirit in the meantime.

Maxine never became my mother-in-law. Not because she was killed and therefore not present when I married her son, but because her son did not marry me after all.

There is no proper title for this space she occupies in my life.

Mother-in-law is a falsehood.

To borrow from Cheryl Strayed, calling Maxine mother-in-law only gets to happen on the ghost ship that carries a sister life I am not living.

Mother-in-spirit does not feel untrue, but it invokes a bit too much insecurity for my liking.

 I hear people saying, She’s still hung up on this? He left her. I hear people say, It’s really not her place. It’s not about her. I hear people say, The ex? What’s her connection? Now, isn’t that a stretch?

So I must call her something else. I must make her something else.

So I say, Maxine is a heron.

I am not sure when this started. I imagine that I’m in conversation with my therapist, explaining to her that, now, Maxine presents as a heron. I imagine my therapist looking down at her notes, maybe glancing down at a mental health evaluation form, looking up at me once again to ask, “Now tell me, how long has this been so?”

Even though I am a writer of poetry and prose, I do not operate in metaphors. I do not mean that Maxine’s essence can be represented by a heron. I do not mean that the herons I see symbolize Maxine. I mean, and I mean it from the place inside me that believes life is a gift and water is sacred, that when I see a heron I am seeing Maxine, alive, again.

I see herons in unconventional places. Herons fly in front of my car as I’m driving on Route 11 between Potsdam, New York, and Burlington, Vermont. Herons fly over the telephone wires in Winooski, Vermont, on my route between my apartment building and the local yoga studio. Blue herons are painted on the side of old brick mill buildings and I see them from my car. I see herons at the beach in front of my cottage on Lake Ontario, the place I grew up, and, for twenty-five years, only spotted seagulls and Canadian Geese. The universe is done surprising me. I could stand behind a heron in line at my local grocery store and would not notice anything strange about the situation at all. I would probably try to hug her, wings and all.

It did not occur to me that my winged run-ins with Maxine could be considered magical thinking. When I re-read Didion – how she needed to hang onto John’s shoes in case he came back and needed them – I knew that I, the reader, was supposed to see Didion and Reality as being separated by a thick-paned glass window. I realized this and still, I thought,  yes, you probably should keep those.

I didn’t think anything of it.

I saw Maxine a few days ago. I was sitting on a public picnic bench reading Jane Hirshfield, The Lives of the Heart, and taking the time to abide beside a water source, even if it was just the Winooski River, sided by old mills, restaurants, and apartment condos. I was thinking the type of thoughts that usually come to me when I’m beside a water source hoping to glean some healing from being in its presence: thoughts that don’t ask why but ask instead for there to be meaning in the different losses I have known.

It was this space I was in when I saw Maxine underneath the bridge that connects Winooski and Burlington. She was underneath the bridge in the little divet that collects both litter and organic debris pushed along by the river. She lifted from that place, her six-foot wingspan in  full view as she skimmed the river before placing herself on the exposed, smooth stretch of rock that marks the place where the languid river steps down into a small waterfall.

I sat with Maxine for a long time – she had landed only a few yards in front of me.

We didn’t say much to each other, mostly because I am still not sure what it is that I am wanting to articulate to her besides, Maxine. But I sat on the picnic table bench and observed her splendor until another pedestrian came upon the promenade. Leaving the riverside was not hard. I was saturated with the gift of her visit.

The words magical thinking only came back to me the other day, when, in Psychopathology class, we were studying mental status examinations and how to properly facilitate them during a patient intake interview.

Among other things, we were being taught to assess a person’s thoughts and perceptions. The handout, SUMMERS, Fundamentals of Case Management Practice: Skills for the Human Services read, “When a person’s perceptions are disordered, it offers important clues to what the diagnosis might be. Here you want to know how people actually perceive themselves, the world around them, and others in their world. What does the person think, and what thoughts and concepts are most on his mind? Perception is the way in which we form an awareness of our environment. People who have difficulties with perceptions often perceive their world inaccurately (LaBruzza, 1994, p. 131).”

Yes, yes, noted, noted, yes.

We went through a list of potential inaccuracies – delusions, distortions, paranoia – nothing that surprised me.

Nothing that surprised me until anchoring the list, were words I had previously only associated with the beloved Didion memoir: Magical thinking.

This is what the handout said:

“Magical thinking: Means belief in astrology or a superstition, or the person thinks he has magical powers in his words, thoughts, or actions. This thinking is found in children who have not developed reality testing. It is part of human development and is not pathological until it becomes extreme, as in obsessive-compulsive disorder or a delusion. Always check religious beliefs or cultural background to see how this thinking fits with what is going on in the person’s life and these aspects of the person’s life (LaBruzza, 1994).”

I found this negative portrayal of magical thinking offensive. Offensive, not to me, but to Didion, to my regard for her. Found in children? My associations with magical thinking had, up until now, been Pulitzer Prize-winning prose. Had been the result of identity-shaping love being taken away without warning. Had been with beauty.

Was I one of them, though? One of these people who have difficulties with perceptions? One of these people who often perceive their world inaccurately?

Is it honest to say that spotting a heron in the Winooski river and knowing in my heart that it is Maxine a difficulty? Who is the judge of inaccuracy here? Who am I harming with my perceptions? Isn’t this between me and Maxine?

It is between me and Maxine until it isn’t.

It is between me and Maxine up until the day comes when I convince myself that she sent me a boy to be with as a reward for all of my suffering. Then I implicate another. Then the matter of accuracy and inaccuracy begins to matter.

Dude I think Maxine sent me a cute boy from the great beyond.

This is an earnest text message I sent to Emma. Emma did not object to this statement. Emma is my very best friend. She asked me to tell her more.

So I got my evidence in order: Get this, his name is Max. And last night we went to dinner and his shirt had a tiny blue heron logo on it which was Maxine’s favorite bird and ever since she died I’ve seen them in strange places.

Emma texts me back, that is too many coincidences.

And so it begins: I tell anyone who will listen to me that Maxine is here. That she is visiting me. That she is bringing me a man to love. That she hand-selected him so I will not get hurt again. That this is undeniable because his name is Max and his shirt had a heron on it and that was her way of telling me not to be afraid.

Perhaps I am enmeshed in a social circle of magical thinkers. Perhaps my peers do not know what to say in the wake of the murder, in the wake of my being abandoned by Maxine’s son. Perhaps when I walk away they turn to each other and say, Well, we can’t take the birds away from her. Let her be. Perhaps they know well an eagle. A cardinal. Whatever their reason, nobody tells me I have difficulties with perceptions. Nobody tells me I am perceiving my world inaccurately.

This was a time when I was writing my perceptions of my world down on a daily basis. I find my journal now, and I see it: The inaccurate jumps. The difficulty I experienced discerning my life.

It goes a little like this.

On April 29th Max the boy and I match on Hinge. On May 6th at 3 am I wake up crying because my dreaming mind makes me relive how Maxine’s son left me. At 7pm Max the boy and I go to dinner. I see a tiny heron on his shirt and I decide that is Maxine telling me that I will love him. On May 9th I write in my journal, I saw a heron in the marshes of Lake Champlain. The universe is speaking to me. On May 11th Max the boy kisses me on my porch and instead of inviting him in a go inside and cry until my body hurts. 

It is probably not a surprise that the reason the SUMMERS mental status examination handout made me uncomfortable was not because of an allegiance to Didion. It was, of course, because of me – how I was trying and failing to balance my intuition with my reckless desire for the great beyond to take the reins of my life.

The language of academia is not my brain’s first wiring. What did spiritual teachers have to say about magical thinking, I wondered. Was there room for herons? For me? Or, more frankly, could I find a confirmation bias somewhere on my bookshelf? I flipped through my meditation books.

It turns out that spiritual teachers are apprehensive about magical thinking, too. Ken Wilber, the mind behind the Integral Meditation approach, has this to say about magical thinking:

“If you have a fair number of these magical beliefs, the recommendation, of course, will be to recognize them, to recognize that hidden map in your life, see how much of your life these superstitious magical beliefs are governing, and then hold them up to direct awareness, bringing them under the sunlight of pure mindfulness and radiant presence, thus turning them into objects ow awareness. See these beliefs as objects in your mindfulness field instead of using them as subjects, as hidden maps, with which you see the world.”

The recommendation, of course.

Can I recognize that believing Maxine is a heron is a magical belief? I am not sure if I want to.

Can I hold this belief up to direct awareness? Yes, that is my pursuit in these pages. 

Am I willing to turn this belief into an object I can observe instead of seeing the world through this belief?  Am I willing to read my journal and admit that I saw a real live man through the lens of a bird?

Well, am I?

The last time I saw Maxine in woman form, we were out to dinner. It was April and it was cold, but the winter had been long and the sun was out so we sat outside on the restaurant’s patio eating fried chicken sandwiches and drinking beer as if we were in a different season. We were at a square table and I sat in between her husband and her son. Maxine sat across from me. The sun behind her. It was bright. We were talking about creative projects – the writer’s residency I was leaving for and the novel I would finish while I was there; then the Airbnb property she was fixing up with her own two hands, making it into something beautiful by adorning her own artwork on its walls.

She was the only adult woman in my family circle who did things like this: who tore out cabinets and pulled up carpets without calling a fix-it man, who painted peonies on full-wall canvases, who believed without apprehension that what she made was beautiful.

I’m not kidding, I can feel your words in my heart.

It’s a good thing you’re not here – I would be smothering you, haha. Xoxoxox.

These are things she said to me in some of our last text exchanges.

No, I am not willing.

I am willing, as Strayed was, to stand on the shore and wave goodbye to my sister life as her son’s wife. I am willing, as Didion was, to force my grief mind into producing something useful. I am willing, as Wilber wants me to be, to hold my beliefs up to the sunlight of pure mindfulness. I am willing, as most reasonable people would recommend, not to assume I will love a stranger I met on a dating app just because his name is Max and has a heron stitched on his polo shirt.

I am not willing, however,  to exist in the lonelier, more malicious world, where some women are killed and some women are left behind and neither are able to transcend the wreckage.

When I see a six-foot wingspan the color of a grieving river open up in full majesty to soar, right here, right here in this post-industrial old mill town – I am not willing to concede that a heron is just a heron.

– Natalli Amato