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.

To mourn is to wonder at the strangeness that grief is not written all over your face in bruised hieroglyphics. And it's also to feel, quite powerfully, that you're not allowed to descend into the deepest fathom of your grief - that to do so would be taboo somehow.

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

I think about my mother every day. But usually the thoughts are fleeting - she crosses my mind like a spring cardinal that flies past the edge of your eye: startling, luminous, lovely... gone.

Many researchers say the dominant emotion experienced after loss is yearning or searching. And while you might feel more anger early on, it's accompanied by a whole host of other feelings.

While I did a lot of research, I ended up feeling that the best way to write about grief was to describe it from the inside out - the show the strange intensities that come along with it, the peculiar thoughts, the longing for that past - all the strange moments of thinking you glimpse the dead person on the street, or in your dreams.

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