There are many kinds of loss embedded in a loss - the loss of the person, and the loss of the self you got to be with that person. And the seeming loss of the past, which now feels forever out of reach.

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.

If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.

Time doesn’t obey our commands. You cannot make it holy just because it is disappearing.

I envy my Jewish friends the ritual of saying kaddish - a ritual that seems perfectly conceived, with its built-in support group and its ceremonious designation of time each day devoted to remembering the lost person.

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.

A mother is a story with no beginning. That is what defines her.