My theory is this: Women falter when they're called on to be highly self-conscious about their talents. Not when they're called on to enact them.

Be patient with yourself. Don't make the loss harder by thinking you should be a certain way, or have bounced back, etc.

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

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.

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.

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.

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