Joan Didion stood in her closet, staring at her husband’s shoes. John was dead. A sudden heart attack had taken him months earlier, yet the shoes stayed on the floor. She could not give them away. Her mind whispered a single, irrational thought: He will need them when he returns.

This is the "magical thinking" that follows devastating loss. We hold our breath. We keep the room exactly as it was. We treat the change as a personal insult from the Universe. We cling to leather and laces because the alternative (that he is simply gone) is a boulder the mind cannot climb over.

But a river that meets a boulder finds a new path.