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

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.

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

Much of Hamlet is about the precise kind of slippage the mourner experiences: the difference between being and seeming, the uncertainty about how the inner translates into the outer, the sense that one is expected to perform grief palatably. (If you don’t seem sad, people worry; but if you are grief-stricken, people flinch away from your pain.)

It's all too easy when talking about female gymnasts to fall into the trap of infantilizing them, spending more time worrying more about female vulnerability than we do celebrating female strength.

Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me.

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