I think that grief is a profound spiritual, metaphysical, and - oddly - physical reckoning with death, which we don't understand well. It's both the process by which you relearn the world in the absence of someone who was a pillar in it, and the process in which you confront the reality of death.

I am the indoctrinated child of two lapsed Irish Catholics. Which is to say: I am not religious.

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.

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.

Many Americans don't mourn in public anymore - we don't wear black, we don't beat our chests and wail.

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.