When my mother was sick, I found myself needing to put down in my journals all sorts of things - to try to understand them, and, I think, to try to r….

One of the grubby truths about a loss is that you don't just mourn the dead person, you mourn the person you got to be when the lost one was alive. T….

A death from a long illness is very different from a sudden death. It gives you time to say goodbye and time to adjust to the idea that the beloved w….

I wasn't prepared for the fact that grief is so unpredictable. It wasn't just sadness, and it wasn't linear. Somehow I'd thought that the first days ….

Writing has always been the primary way I make sense of the world..

I think about my mother every day. But usually the thoughts are fleeting - she crosses my mind like a spring cardinal that flies past the edge of you….

Grief is characterized much more by waves of feeling that lessen and reoccur, it's less like stages and more like different states of feeling..

A mother is the portal by which you enter the world..

All love stories are tales of beginnings. When we talk about falling in love, we go to the beginning, to pinpoint the moment of freefall..

There are many kinds of loss embedded in a loss - the loss of the person, and the loss of the self you got to be with that person. And the seeming lo….

Grief is a bad moon, a sleeper wave. It's like having an inner combatant, a saboteur who, at the slightest change in the sunlight, or at the first no….

One word I had throughout the first year and a half of my mother's death was 'unmoored.' I felt that I had no anchor, that I had no home in the world..

Yet the story of Orpheus, it occurs to me, is not just about the desire of the living to resuscitate the dead but about the ways in which the dead dr….

Funerals cost so much money, and are likely to be an additional source of stress in this recession - it's sad that we don't have a more humane, less ….

The truth is, I need to experience my mother's presence in the world around me and not just in my head..

If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal..

I am the indoctrinated child of two lapsed Irish Catholics. Which is to say: I am not religious..

A mother is a story with no beginning. That is what defines her..

There is always tension in women's gymnastics between athleticism, grace, performance, and eros..

One of the things about grief is that it can bring a deeper perspective into your life; in the end, it has, for me, though it's also brought sorrow..

Sometimes you don't even know what you want until you find out you can't have it..