Vanessa Redgrave and Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking"

On Saturday I met about 20 widows and widowers in New York City to see "The Year of Magical Thinking," a spectacular one-woman show performed by Vanessa Redgrave and written by Joan Didion.
There were two things in particular I especially liked about the play. One was the way Redgrave/Didion talked about how she requested reports and found out exactly how long the ambulance took and how long paramedics worked on her husband. I have not done that, but I've wanted to and hearing that JOAN DIDION did it made me feel better. I also thought the whole thing with the magical thinking was great. It STILL bothers me that my husband's body was buried in a coffin inside a vault. What if he comes back to life? He'll be stuck there. And finally, I think (I don't have Vanessa Redgrave's awesome memory skills) Didion pointed out that she didn't really grieve her loss until she stopped engaging in the magical thinking. I think there's truth to that and it helps explain why the second year of widowhood can be harder than the first in some ways.