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.

My whole life, I had been taught to read and study, to seek understanding in knowledge of history, of cultures.

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

One of the things about grief is that it can bring a deeper perspective into your life; in the end, it has, for me, though it's also brought sorrow.

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.

One of the difficulties with grief research is that it risks making certain kinds of grief seem normal and others abnormal - and of course having a sense of the contours of grief is, I think, truly useful, one has to remember it's not a science, it's an individual reckoning, which science is just trying to help us describe.

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