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

The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course.

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 quietest and kindest of marriages.

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

The flaw is the thing we love.

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.

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