6 ideas
Didion could not give away John's shoes because some unexamined part of her reasoned that he would need them when he came back. The gesture shows magical thinking working as a hidden rule that governs actions while the conscious mind knows perfectly well the person is dead.
People imagine grief ahead of time as dignified sorrow that fades over time. What actually arrives is waves, paroxysms, and a physical, disorienting derangement. This includes the obliterating absence that follows, which no one pictures in advance.
Life changes fast, in the instant, and the instant is almost always unremarkable, like sitting down to dinner. Survivors fixate on how ordinary the moment was because nothing marked it as the dividing line. Its ordinariness makes it both unbearable and impossible to stop replaying.
Any street, song, or date can pull the bereaved into a chain of associations that ends in the loss. Didion learns to steer around certain routes and memories the way one avoids physical hazards. Grief becomes a problem of navigating one's own mind.
Didion responds to death and to her daughter's illness by reading medical literature, autopsy reports, and studies of grief. Mastering the facts lets her feel she might have prevented the death or can still control the outcome. The research serves as a form of magical thinking disguised as rationality.
Mourning eventually requires relinquishing the dead and allowing them to become a photograph on the table rather than a living presence one keeps revising. Didion recognizes that holding on keeps the dead alive in the mind. She also sees that it keeps the living tied to the past, which forces a choice between fidelity and continuing to live.