Joan Didion wrote a book called ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’, about the grief and mourning that followed her husband’s death in December 2003. This book is investigative journalism attacking the self. A writer’s deep reflection on the end of a symbiotic relationship of 40 years; the bereavement and irrationality that followed; and the vortexes she couldn’t escape. I’m 19 as I write this. I was never the target audience for this book. Even as I binged through reading it, I knew this book wasn’t for me. But if grief hits everyone the same, I was reminded that it hit my mother too. I saw what it was like for her to go through the intense grief following the death of my father. And how she was then asked, throughout the years, to shed these parts of herself and look ahead. Time and again, people who grieve are asked not to indulge in self-pity even when every timed-by-the-clock habit that they’ve followed for decades, have to at once, be discarded. Conversations and chores wou...