A death from a long illness is very different from a sudden death. It gives you time to say goodbye and time to adjust to the idea that the beloved will not be with you anymore.

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

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

Our minds are mysterious; our conscious brain is like a ship on a sea that is obscure to us.

There is always tension in women's gymnastics between athleticism, grace, performance, and eros.

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.

My mother never liked Mother's Day. She thought it was a fake holiday dreamed up by Hallmark to commodify deep sentiments that couldn't be expressed with a card.