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

What had happened still seemed implausible. A person was present your entire life, and then one day she disappeared and never came back. It resisted belief.

I have seen that grief can be very different for different people. While the range of emotions experienced is similar, the way we deal with those emotions isn't, necessarily.

Faith does help mourners survive their loss, some studies suggest; but I imagine one still struggles.

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.

I am the indoctrinated child of two lapsed Irish Catholics. Which is to say: I am not religious.

Like my mother before me, I have always been a good speller.