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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Sometimes you don't even know what you want until you find out you can't have it.