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.

I think about my mother every day. But usually the thoughts are fleeting - she crosses my mind like a spring cardinal that flies past the edge of your eye: startling, luminous, lovely... gone.

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.

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

There are many kinds of loss embedded in a loss - the loss of the person, and the loss of the self you got to be with that person. And the seeming loss of the past, which now feels forever out of reach.

It's all too easy when talking about female gymnasts to fall into the trap of infantilizing them, spending more time worrying more about female vulnerability than we do celebrating female strength.

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.