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

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

Scratch a fantasy and you'll find a nightmare.

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

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

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

It's taken years for me to understand that dying doesn't end the story; it transforms it. Edits, rewrites, the blur, aand epiphany of one-way dialogue. Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance, does us part-- time and space and heart's weariness are the blander executioners or human connection.