There is no single way of grieving. But research suggests that there are some broad similarities among grievers.

The people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created.

I think that grief is a profound spiritual, metaphysical, and - oddly - physical reckoning with death, which we don't understand well. It's both the process by which you relearn the world in the absence of someone who was a pillar in it, and the process in which you confront the reality of death.

A mother is a story with no beginning. That is what defines her.

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.

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

Sometimes you don't even know what you want until you find out you can't have it.