been reading: The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

This memoir describes the year following the death of the author's husband, John. There's no more eloquent way to summarize this book than to use her own words:

This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.
(The Year of Magical Thinking)

Beautifully written and raw, this book is simultaneously a portrait of a four-decade marriage and a year of debilitating grief. It's a portrait of a strong, intelligent woman who finds herself bereft in every sense of the word. She is unabashedly honest as she describes her despair. For example, she admits that she cannot toss out any of her husband's shoes because when he comes back he will need them. She rationally knows he's not coming back, and yet she continually employs such magical thinking. Because a world without him just isn't an option. To be without him is an impossibility to her.

One of the things that most struck me was how so many daily details evoked memories of her husband. I've thought about this before myself, how if I ever lost Rob, I would be constantly bombarded by tiny reminders of him - songs and places and news articles and even items in the grocery store - and that these connections to him would be both welcome and extremely painful. Didion describes a frequent experience which she calls "the vortex effect" - when something (seemingly random and innocent to the reader) starts a spiral of thinking that leads to a memory of John. She tries to avoid vortex thinking at all costs, but finds that it easily overcomes her. And so even as she attempts to move past his death, she is preoccupied with reliving the moments of their life.

In some of these moments, she has regrets. Why did they have such trivial arguments? Why didn't she swim in the Mediterranean with him that one night instead of refusing because she had a cut on her leg that might get infected? Why hadn't she sufficiently appreciated each moment? And had she really listened to him, really heard and understood him? After 40 years together they thought they knew each other in and out, but did she really know him at all?

John died at home, during dinner. Didion says one moment he was talking and then he wasn't. She says that in an ordinary instant, everything changed. And what Didion suggests, without ever actually stating, is that life is made of ordinary instants, ordinary moments. And it's the ordinary moments we'll yearn for and cherish and weep over when they're gone. It's the ordinary moments we should live to the fullest now.