Riane’s Reviews > Goodbye for Now > Status Update

Life, full of twist and turns but somewhere down the line, if you are lucky enough, you find somebody to not just endure life with, but to love life with. Sometimes life is a joke, the very most precious insurmountably irreplaceable unbelievable miracle of your life is swept away and you are left crushed in its dust.

Readers may be filled with healing and crushing healing, both on the road of continued living.

The irony of the plot twist at this time and the other markings made in the physical book to note such baffling yet heartbreaking and somewhat to be expected occurrences make this an even harder read than it was in the beginning.

A book for everywhere/time, since every opportunity, grief may come at you and lessons, and also enlightenment.

By now, the book tackles a multitude of strangers likened only by their shared experiences of loss and grief. Stereotypes even in survivor's guilt shows disparities of coping with loss depending on age, biology and time since the loss.

We are all strangers until death comes for us all in the end.

Now, more than ever, this book's content reverberates through my soul. To have the access and privilege to communicate with a Dead Loved One (DLO), as much as a double-edged sword it may be, it is what many feel they need and just want to comtinue living without the person they lost. Death is constant, a canon event, but its loss makes the differential. Long or quick, then or now, loss feels whatever the case may be.

Grief, like opinions, are personal and unique. A particular way of processing or coping may not fare well with different people or even with similar people with different experiences. The occurrence in its deepest, most important aspects are subjective and only objective in the sense of mass teaching of viable options to remain sane in moments of loss. No matter the loss, no one really knows how to live with it.

Grief may come with denial, delusion and depression that has a very few in-the-moment considerable resolutions or at the very least alleviation tactics. AI software way ahead of its time in the early 2000s like in the book with today's advancement of deep fake tech would definitely be a tempting coping mechanism for those in grief. May it be less rational that it may be calming or comforting.

Countless suggestions are given to grieving souls on how to move on and live on. Does grief ever cease, though? Does anything ever work? Writing letters the way once commonplace for communication and closure, does not receiving anything close or open further a heart's longing?

Grief unravelling from not being overcome is quite a hard deja vu phenomenon in one's life. Reliving a life of another based on broken and incomplete almost fading memories, just to fall back into to reality, that that person is no longer around, almost not even a memory.