What's endlessly complicated in thinking about women's gymnastics is the way that vulnerability and power are threaded through the sport.

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.

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.

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

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

'Hamlet' is a play about a man whose grief is deemed unseemly.

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.