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By Grace Stearns | Monday,
March 30, 2015 - Off the Shelf
“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach
it,” Joan Didion concludes at the close of her 2011 memoir A Year of Magical Thinking.
“Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference
between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that
follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of
moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness
itself.”
For Artis Henderson, grief was a place reached in early
childhood, after she survived the airplane crash that killed her father. She
was just five years old. Grief was a place to which Artis returned two
decades later, when her husband of four months died in a non-combat-related
helicopter accident in Iraq.
Henderson’s memoir, Unremarried Widow, unfolds within the
eerie, symmetrical tension of these two catastrophic events, her renderings
of which expertly map the intimate contours of the mysterious transformation
we all undergo in the face of tremendous loss. Laced with lyricism and
complexity, Henderson’s generous account of the loss of her husband capably
transports even those who have yet to reach the incorporeal location Didion
desc... READ
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