She didn't want to give away his shoes, in case he came back

The Year of Magical Thinking
Joan Didion
London: Fourth Estate
12.99 pounds
Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. These lines form a refrain that recurs through Joan Didion's account of the sudden death of her husband, and her attempts to deal with this fact.
She, and her husband who had been married for forty years, had just returned from an ICU unit in which their daughter, Quintana, was lying in a medically induced coma.They sat down to dinner and he suffered a fatal heart attack. The daughter died after the completion of the book.
John Gregory Dunne, the husband was a novelist, and for most of the years they were married they worked from home, discussing each other's work, re-reading it, working on screenplays in Los Angeles, and traveling to New York on work.
They were almost always together. Yet, when she says to the doctor at the hospital to which he was taken, "He's dead, isn't he?" the doctor looked at the social worker who replied, "It's okay. She's a pretty cool customer."
Joan Didion says she had trouble thinking of herself as a widow. She couldn't give away John's shoes in case he needed them when he came back. She avoided restaurants, and neighbourhoods where they had been together.
She insisted on an autopsy to know exactly how he died, even though he had had a heart condition for years. "People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognisable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces....The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness."
Readers will also empathise with the statement, "On most surface levels I seemed rational. To the average observer I would have appeared to fully understand that death was irreversible.
I had authorised the autopsy. I had arranged for cremation...I had done it. I had acknowledged that he was dead. I had done this in as public a way as I could conceive...Yet my thinking on this point remained suspiciously fluid."
What may seem paradoxical in so personal an account is the fact that, as in much "confessional" writing, the reader is kept at a distance through the style.
Though written for the most part in the past tense, the account of her husband's sudden attack and all that followed has an immediacy that makes it seem to be a continuous present tense, as if the writer was so immersed in her thinking that she is scarcely aware of a reader.
The lines are often staccato in their rhythm. At times, however, these short, staccato lines come close to being mannered, journalistic.
Perhaps the lines one remembers best are the ones she quotes from poets, the finest being lines from the "dark sonnets" of Gerald Manley Hopkins, "I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day."