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

Television has never known what to do with grief, which resists narrative: the dramas of grief are largely internal - for the bereaved, it is a chaotic, intense, episodic period, but the chaos is by and large subterranean, and easily appears static to the friendly onlooker who has absorbed the fact of loss and moved on.

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

Loss doesn't feel redeemable. But for me one consoling aspect is the recognition that, in this at least, none of us is different from anyone else: We all lose loved ones; we all face our own death.

If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.

'Hamlet' is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it.

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.