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

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

the mother's first job is to raise a daughter strong enough to outlast her.

The Hours is in fact a lovely triumph. Cunningham honors both Mrs. Dalloway and its creator with unerring sensitivity, thanks to his modesty of intention and his sovereignly affecting prose.... With his elliptical evocation of Mrs. Dalloway, he has managed to pay great but quiet tribute -- reminding us of the gorgeous, ferocious beauty of what endures.

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

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 smiled with relief. "There's nothing," I said. "I've already told her everything.

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