One of the ideas I've clung to most of my life is that if I just try hard enough it will work out.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Funerals cost so much money, and are likely to be an additional source of stress in this recession - it's sad that we don't have a more humane, less commercialized way to approach burial.