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

I am the indoctrinated child of two lapsed Irish Catholics. Which is to say: I am not religious.

'Hamlet' is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it.

One of the things about grief is that it can bring a deeper perspective into your life; in the end, it has, for me, though it's also brought sorrow.

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.

Television has never known what to do with grief, which resists narrative: the dramas of grief are largely internal - for the bereaved, it is a chaotic, intense, episodic period, but the chaos is by and large subterranean, and easily appears static to the friendly onlooker who has absorbed the fact of loss and moved on.

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.