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.

Grief is a bad moon, a sleeper wave. It's like having an inner combatant, a saboteur who, at the slightest change in the sunlight, or at the first notes of a jingle for a dog food commercial, will flick the memory switch, bringing tears to your eyes.

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.

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.

A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without sky: unimaginable.

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