Simply magical.

The following excerpt is from Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking:

People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness. It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist's office into the bright daylght with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off. These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themsleves invisible. I myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal. I seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead, entered a place in which I could be seen only by those who were themsleves recently bereaved. I understood for the first time the power in the image of the rivers, the Styx, the Lethe, the cloaked ferryman with his pole. I understood for the first time the meaning in the practice of suttee. Widows did not throw themselves on the burning raft out of grief. The burning raft was instead an accurate representation of the place to which their frief (not their families, not the community, not custom, their grief) had taken them. On the night John died we were thrity-one days short of our fortieth anniversary...
I wanted more than a night of memories and sighs.
I wanted to scream.
I wanted him back.

Rather than risk the possibility of farkeling up a review of this book with my amateurish opinions, I will just say that Didion's memoir of grieving following the death of her husband John Gregory Dunne stayed with me for quite a while after I had finished it. There's been a lot of critiques of the book, especially since it won the National Book Award, and while some may call Didion's prose too removed or cold for a book on grieving, I felt that her tone was that of someone trying genuinely to cope, to rationally think through a process that isn't rational at all. But reading Didion's strong, unique voice, simply contemplating the emotions and memories that accompany the loss of someone so close can be its own comfort. The Year of Magical Thinking does all the things that a good memoir should--deeply honest and beautifully written, it takes us for a brief moment into the mind of its creator.

For more on Didion and her memoir, check out an interview she did with NPR's Terry Gross.