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.

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

But when my mother died, I found that I did not believe that she was gone.

This is part of the complexity of grief: A piece of you recognizes it is an extreme state, an altered state, yet a large part of you is entirely subject to its demands.

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.

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

'Hamlet' is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it.