Kani’s Reviews > The Year of Magical Thinking > Status Update

I really did spend almost all of 2023 with a book about grief

"On takeoff he held my hand until the plane began leveling. He always did. Where did that go?"

Sometimes you read something and you're like how did this person make it through any of this. And you have a very sinking realization that you'd make it through too, if only because people don't just get to choose to die of pain.

"People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces."

"One way in which grief gets hidden is that death now occurs largely offstage. In the earlier tradition from which Mrs. Post wrote, the act of dying had not yet been professionalized. It did not typically involve hospitals. [...] Death was up close, at home."