And after my mother's death I became more open to and empathetic about other people's struggles and losses.

My whole life, I had been taught to read and study, to seek understanding in knowledge of history, of cultures.

A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without sky: unimaginable.

Suddenly it was fall, the season of death, the anniversary of things-going-to-hell.

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.

All love stories are tales of beginnings. When we talk about falling in love, we go to the beginning, to pinpoint the moment of freefall.

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