When my mother was sick, I found myself needing to put down in my journals all sorts of things - to try to understand them, and, I think, to try to remember them.

All love stories are tales of beginnings. When we talk about falling in love, we go to the beginning, to pinpoint the moment of freefall.

Time doesn’t obey our commands. You cannot make it holy just because it is disappearing.

Funerals cost so much money, and are likely to be an additional source of stress in this recession - it's sad that we don't have a more humane, less commercialized way to approach burial.

My whole life, I had been taught to read and study, to seek understanding in knowledge of history, of cultures.

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

Grief is characterized much more by waves of feeling that lessen and reoccur, it's less like stages and more like different states of feeling.