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

Suddenly it was fall, the season of death, the anniversary of things-going-to-hell.

A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without sky: unimaginable.

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.

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

This is part of the complexity of grief: A piece of you recognizes it is an extreme state, an altered state, yet a large part of you is entirely subject to its demands.

Many grievers experience intense yearning or longing after a death - more than they experience, say, denial.