The Year of Magical Thinking

by Joan Didion

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.

Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.

“A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty,”