One of the difficulties with grief research is that it risks making certain kinds of grief seem normal and others abnormal - and of course having a sense of the contours of grief is, I think, truly useful, one has to remember it's not a science, it's an individual reckoning, which science is just trying to help us describe.

There is no single way of grieving. But research suggests that there are some broad similarities among grievers.

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.

Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me.

The people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created.

And after my mother's death I became more open to and empathetic about other people's struggles and losses.