My mother died of metastatic colorectal cancer shortly before three P.M. on Christmas Day of 2008. I don't know the exact time of her death, because none of us thought to look at a clock for a while after she stopped breathing.

This is part of the complexity of grief: A piece of you recognizes it is an extreme state, an altered state, yet a large part of you is entirely subject to its demands.

What's endlessly complicated in thinking about women's gymnastics is the way that vulnerability and power are threaded through the sport.

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

But when my mother died, I found that I did not believe that she was gone.

While I did a lot of research, I ended up feeling that the best way to write about grief was to describe it from the inside out - the show the strange intensities that come along with it, the peculiar thoughts, the longing for that past - all the strange moments of thinking you glimpse the dead person on the street, or in your dreams.

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