I live to collect information, and I am also a perfectionist.

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.

And after my mother's death I became more open to and empathetic about other people's struggles and losses.

For sure, the funeral industry seems intensely cynical to me and I don't think it is HELPING people mourn.

One of the ideas I've clung to most of my life is that if I just try hard enough it will work out.

A mother is beyond any notion of a beginning. That's what makes her a mother.

One of the grubby truths about a loss is that you don't just mourn the dead person, you mourn the person you got to be when the lost one was alive. This loss might even be what affects you the most.