One of the grubby truths about a loss is that you don't just mourn the dead person, you mourn the person you got to be when the lost one was alive. This loss might even be what affects you the most.

'Hamlet' is a play about a man whose grief is deemed unseemly.

Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity was wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the loss.

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

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.)

My theory is this: Women falter when they're called on to be highly self-conscious about their talents. Not when they're called on to enact them.

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