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.

Like my mother before me, I have always been a good speller.

Loss is so paradoxical: It is at once enormous and tiny.

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

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

A mother is the portal by which you enter the world.

Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity was wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the loss.