Useful Death?

Is any source of death helpful for coping with ones encounter with grief and death? Some may argue that it does, but death and grief is always a personal struggle. In Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking, Didion draws from many sources of literature and even medical texts to cope with the death of her husband, John.
Being a person who does not address a religious struggle through the death of a loved one, Didion not only shows her readers how lost a person is without faith, but a person in need of finding faith in something. Desperately trying to investigate her grief and its source is odd to me, since grief is only natural to anyone human. But is a person not human if they don’t appear to grieve?
Death in any case is never helpful or useful. That is only society breathing down our necks, forcing us to move on with the threat that if we don’t, we appear to the world as a person lost in an abyss. Death is fundamentally something we all have to deal with in our lives, whether that of someone we know or our own eventual death. Mortality then becomes the main issue here, where Didion shouldn’t necessarily focus on death, but mortality. Although death is a sign of our own mortality, death is negative and therefore swept under the social rug of human flaw. Looking at the race of man as being flawed may offer more comfort in the fact that death is only written about so often because people try to understand why we die and maybe not so much when or where or how.
Although Didion does not directly address religion in her book, she still seeks the same answers that religious individuals also try to find. The afterlife is only one way of approaching grief, but Didion must have found this track commonplace and decided to write something unique in respect to death. Looking at others’ way of dealing with grief may be useful only for the sake of the moment, but in the end we all have to come up with our own way of comfort.