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

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

What had happened still seemed implausible. A person was present your entire life, and then one day she disappeared and never came back. It resisted belief.

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

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.

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

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.