But when my mother died, I found that I did not believe that she was gone.

We have an idea - a very modern idea - that dying is undignified. But I think this is because we have the illusion that we can control our bodies and our fates.

I'm not much like my mother; that role falls to my brothers, who have more of her blithe and freewheeling spirit.

Loss is so paradoxical: It is at once enormous and tiny.

Grief is at once a public and a private experience. One's inner, inexpressible disruption cannot be fully realized in one's public persona.

Many Americans don't mourn in public anymore - we don't wear black, we don't beat our chests and wail.

I think that grief is a profound spiritual, metaphysical, and - oddly - physical reckoning with death, which we don't understand well. It's both the process by which you relearn the world in the absence of someone who was a pillar in it, and the process in which you confront the reality of death.