The Year of Magical Thinking

I read this book by Joan Didion over the Christmas Holiday.

This book chronicles the year after her husband's death and her daughter's serious illness.
It's not really a narrative, it's more like stream-of-consciousness writing to me.
Joan Didion writes most heart-breakingly about the intense grief she experienced after the death of her husband.
It was so painful for me to read because I am still in that first year of magical thinking. No, I didn't lose my spouse or partner but I did lose someone very important to me whom I loved dearly and I feel his loss to my very core.
Didion describes the inability to accept her husband's death and the unreasonable belief that he would be coming back.
She didn't get rid of all of his shoes because, of course, he would need shoes when he came back!

I had to put the book down so many times in tears because Ms. Didion's grief resounded so strongly with my own fresh grief.

However, she proved in this book that somehow, someway, even through intense pain...almost crippling pain....we can continue living.
When you're hurting that bad, you should be paralyzed or disabled. You think that one day you'll look in the mirror and be as disfigured as you feel.
But you go on. Maybe because you are forced to or maybe because that's just the way the universe works...
but you go on.