Many researchers say the dominant emotion experienced after loss is yearning or searching. And while you might feel more anger early on, it's accompanied by a whole host of other feelings.

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. This loss might even be what affects you the most.

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

Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity was wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the loss.

For sure, the funeral industry seems intensely cynical to me and I don't think it is HELPING people mourn.

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

A mother is beyond any notion of a beginning. That's what makes her a mother.