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.

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

'Hamlet' is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it.

While I did a lot of research, I ended up feeling that the best way to write about grief was to describe it from the inside out - the show the strange intensities that come along with it, the peculiar thoughts, the longing for that past - all the strange moments of thinking you glimpse the dead person on the street, or in your dreams.

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

I wasn't prepared for the fact that grief is so unpredictable. It wasn't just sadness, and it wasn't linear. Somehow I'd thought that the first days would be the worst and then it would get steadily better - like getting over the flu. That's not how it was.

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