To mourn is to wonder at the strangeness that grief is not written all over your face in bruised hieroglyphics. And it's also to feel, quite powerfully, that you're not allowed to descend into the deepest fathom of your grief - that to do so would be taboo somehow.

Many grievers experience intense yearning or longing after a death - more than they experience, say, denial.

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

I live to collect information, and I am also a perfectionist.

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

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

Yet the story of Orpheus, it occurs to me, is not just about the desire of the living to resuscitate the dead but about the ways in which the dead drag us along into their shadowy realm because we cannot let them go. So we follow them into the Underworld, descending, descending, until one day we turn and make our way back.