the memoir of grief is in fashion, since joan didion's year of magical thinking. recent installments come from joyce carol oates, francisco goldman, david plante, and a number of others. now i will not read these books, in part because i have enough grief of my own without wallowing in yours. so i don't know whether this thought that i just ran across in edmund burke's a philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful is a commonplace of this literature or not. but burke counts grief as (complex, mixed) pleasure and a source of experiences of beauty:

The person who grieves, suffers his passion to grow upon him; he indulges it, he loves it: but this never happens in the case of actual pain, which no man ever willingly endured for any considerable time. That grief should be willingly endured, though far from a simply pleasing sensation, is not so difficult to be understood. It is the nature of grief to keep its object perpetually in its eye, to present it in its most pleasurable views, to repeat all the circumstances that attend it, even to the last minuteness; to go back to every particular enjoyment, to dwell upon each, and to find a thousand new perfections in all, that were not sufficiently understood before; in grief the pleasure is still uppermost; and the affliction we suffer has no resemblance to absolute pain.

it is of course a bittersweet pleasure, and also alloyed with pain. but you dwell on memory, you try to hold the memories precious, to experience them with the utmost intensity. grief is an experience of love and its loss: that to me is actually the essence of the beautiful: a total longing. you are in grief in part because you want to be. and you should. and it should dissolve imperceptibly over years; you don't overcome or abandon it. if you do not delectate it, revel in it, want it more than anything, you lose faith with the person over whom you grieve. that is why such books could be moving, useful, or a pleasure rather than a mere pain to read. whether any of these are actually that, i will not pretend to decide.