One word I had throughout the first year and a half of my mother's death was 'unmoored.' I felt that I had no anchor, that I had no home in the world.

Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me.

Grief is at once a public and a private experience. One's inner, inexpressible disruption cannot be fully realized in one's public persona.

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

The truth is, I need to experience my mother's presence in the world around me and not just in my head.

But when my mother died, I found that I did not believe that she was gone.

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.