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.

A mother is the portal by which you enter the world.

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.

Faith does help mourners survive their loss, some studies suggest; but I imagine one still struggles.

A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without sky: unimaginable.

One word I had throughout the first year and a half of my mother's death was 'unmoored.' I felt that I had no anchor, that I had no home in the world.

If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.