'Hamlet' is a play about a man whose grief is deemed unseemly.

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.

Many Americans don't mourn in public anymore - we don't wear black, we don't beat our chests and wail.

Our minds are mysterious; our conscious brain is like a ship on a sea that is obscure to us.

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.

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

I have seen that grief can be very different for different people. While the range of emotions experienced is similar, the way we deal with those emotions isn't, necessarily.