Grief is what tells you who you are alone..

Old dogs can be a regal sight. Their exuberance settles over the years into a seasoned nobility, their routines become as locked into yours as the qu….

I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures..

My idea of a productive day, as both a child and an adult, was reading for hours and staring out the window..

the territory of grief ... is both cruel and commonplace..

Like a starfish, the heart endures its amputation..

The truth, or success, of any writer's story lies partly in its specificity and its emotional honesty..

Grief doesn't necessarily make you noble. Sometimes it just makes you crazy, or primitive with fear..

The flaw is the thing we love..

Hope in the beginning feels like such a violation of the loss, and yet without it we couldn't survive..

What do you do when the story changes in midlife? When a tale you have told yourself turns out to be a little untrue, just enough to throw the world ….

The real hell of this," he told her, "is that you're going to get through it..

What they never tell you about grief is that missing someone is the simple part..

The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. Until Caroline had died I had belonged to that other world, the place of inno….

I'd confused need with love and love with sacrifice..

memory is both the curse of grief and the eventual talisman against it; what at first seems unbearable becomes the succor that can outlast pain..

That she was irreplaceable became a bittersweet loyalty: Her death was what I had now instead of her..

Maybe this is the point: to embrace the core sadness of life without toppling headlong into it, or assuming it will define your days..

Near the end I asked him one night in the hospital corridor what he thought was happening, and he said, "Tell her everything you haven't said," and I….

It's and old, old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too..

You can’t change the tale so that you turned left one day instead of right, or didn’t make the mistake that might have saved your life a day later. W….