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

There is no single way of grieving. But research suggests that there are some broad similarities among grievers.

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

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

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

Writing has always been the primary way I make sense of the world.

Yet the story of Orpheus, it occurs to me, is not just about the desire of the living to resuscitate the dead but about the ways in which the dead drag us along into their shadowy realm because we cannot let them go. So we follow them into the Underworld, descending, descending, until one day we turn and make our way back.