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.

A mother is beyond any notion of a beginning. That's what makes her a mother.

Much of Hamlet is about the precise kind of slippage the mourner experiences: the difference between being and seeming, the uncertainty about how the inner translates into the outer, the sense that one is expected to perform grief palatably. (If you don’t seem sad, people worry; but if you are grief-stricken, people flinch away from your pain.)

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 believe in the importance of individuality, but in the midst of grief I also find myself wanting connection - wanting to be reminded that the sadness I feel is not just mine but ours.

It's a blessing not to be alone in your grief but it's also painful to see your parents and siblings in pain.

Loss is so paradoxical: It is at once enormous and tiny.