The Widow Gyllenhaal

Something funny happens midway through The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion's memoir of her husband's sudden death and the prolonged, serial near-deaths of her daughter. Didion quotes a passage from C. S. Lewis which fills you with the overwhelming conviction as you read it that you should really be holding his book in your hands right now instead of Joan D's:

I think I'm beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense; it comes from the frustration of so many impulses that have become habitual Thought after thought, feeling after feeling, action after action, had H. for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit, fitting an arrow to the string then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead thought to H. I set out on one of them but, now, there's an impassable frontier post across it. So many roads once, now so many cul de sacs.
--C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

(I did like Ms. Didion's book though.)