The first months had a shape. There were things to sign, people to answer, a funeral to survive. The year after has no shape at all, and it arrives just as everyone else has quietly filed the whole thing under finished.
You have probably noticed that you cannot read the way you used to. Long sentences slide off. This is ordinary and it passes. In the meantime the books that will reach you are the short ones, written in pieces, usually by someone who could not hold a paragraph together either at the time.
None of these three will console you on schedule. One of them is angry.
C. S. Lewis · 1961
Four notebooks kept by a man who had already published a tidy book explaining suffering, and who discovered that none of it survived contact with his own. He wrote it under a false name. It is short and it contradicts itself from one page to the next, and it is the least consoling famous book about grief, which is why it still works at the point where the consoling ones have begun to feel like an insult.
Natalia Ginzburg · 1962
Essays by a woman whose husband died in a Roman prison in 1944, and who goes on describing shoes, houses, money and her children in prose so level it takes a moment to notice what it is carrying. Read "Winter in the Abruzzi" first, then stop for a day. This is the book for the stage where you need to see that a life continued, without being told that yours will.
Marilynne Robinson · 2004
An old man writing a letter to a son who will read it after he is gone. It is the only one of the three that looks at death from the other side, from the person doing the leaving, and it does something quiet and enormous: it makes the ordinary world look worth the loss. Save it for later in the year. Too early, it will bounce off.
Answer the questions and let the Oracle read you
