I envy my Jewish friends the ritual of saying kaddish - a ritual that seems perfectly conceived, with its built-in support group and its ceremonious designation of time each day devoted to remembering the lost person.

Our minds are mysterious; our conscious brain is like a ship on a sea that is obscure to us.

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.

My mother died of metastatic colorectal cancer shortly before three P.M. on Christmas Day of 2008. I don't know the exact time of her death, because none of us thought to look at a clock for a while after she stopped breathing.

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 remember them.

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 notes of a jingle for a dog food commercial, will flick the memory switch, bringing tears to your eyes.

Television has never known what to do with grief, which resists narrative: the dramas of grief are largely internal - for the bereaved, it is a chaotic, intense, episodic period, but the chaos is by and large subterranean, and easily appears static to the friendly onlooker who has absorbed the fact of loss and moved on.