Writing has always been the primary way I make sense of the world.

I have seen that grief can be very different for different people. While the range of emotions experienced is similar, the way we deal with those emotions isn't, necessarily.

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.

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

I wasn't prepared for the fact that grief is so unpredictable. It wasn't just sadness, and it wasn't linear. Somehow I'd thought that the first days would be the worst and then it would get steadily better - like getting over the flu. That's not how it was.

I'm not much like my mother; that role falls to my brothers, who have more of her blithe and freewheeling spirit.

There is always tension in women's gymnastics between athleticism, grace, performance, and eros.