Three (More) Books about Loss and Grief (by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Paul Auster, and Joan Didion)

Regular readers of this blog know that my beloved husband died just over two years ago, and that since then I have read quite a few books about loss, grief, and mourning. I have posted about some of these (e.g., 2/22/22, 12/1/22, 2/24/23, 11/7/23, 11/15/23). Reading these books is always painful, and at first I could not read them, but after some time I found that they were sometimes comforting, in the sense of connecting me with others' experiences of loss, and experiencing the universality and community of bereavement and grief. I have just read three more books about grief, and will describe each one very briefly here. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's "Notes on Grief" (Knopf, 2021) is a slim volume, an acute cry of pain at the recent death of her dear father, one which also celebrates the person and father he was. "Baumgartner" (Grove, 2023) is a novel by Paul Auster in which the title character deeply mourns his wife Anna, who died nine years before, and cannot seem to get past his grief and pain. Auster explores the intertwining of pain and happy memories, and the nature of memory itself. The third book is one I read almost twenty years ago, soon after the death of my dear father: Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking" (Knopf, 2005; Vintage, 2007), about the death of her husband John Gregory Dunne (and the illness and later death of her daughter Quintana, about whose death Didion later wrote a book titled "Blue Nights," which I have also read). I was struck at that time by Didion's description of her feelings and actions during the year or so after her husband's sudden death, many of which resonated with me about my father's death, especially such aspects as disbelief/denial, numbness and confusion. I tried to re-read the book about a year ago, but just couldn't; I have just now finally read it again, and found it as powerful and resonant as ever, now in light of the profound loss of my husband of decades. Among other aspects that Didion describes well is the terrible tangible loss of the dailiness, the ongoing conversations and habits, of a long-married couple's life. These two nonfiction books and one novel are all extremely difficult and sad to read, but also insightful and reassuring in a strange way: they remind us that although each death is unique, it is also part of all deaths, and that all mourners have many things in common. We who are left behind are part of a huge community of the bereaved, those who are grieving loved ones.