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.

Faith does help mourners survive their loss, some studies suggest; but I imagine one still struggles.

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

My mother never liked Mother's Day. She thought it was a fake holiday dreamed up by Hallmark to commodify deep sentiments that couldn't be expressed with a card.

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

I was not raised with religion, and I had no faith before my mother died. On the other hand, when she died, I did not immediately feel she was "gone." I don't believe she is in something like heaven, but I also feel that we don't understand much about the nature of the universe. So I hold on to that uncertainty, at times.

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.