Much of Hamlet is about the precise kind of slippage the mourner experiences: the difference between being and seeming, the uncertainty about how the inner translates into the outer, the sense that one is expected to perform grief palatably. (If you don’t seem sad, people worry; but if you are grief-stricken, people flinch away from your pain.)

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

I'm not much like my mother; that role falls to my brothers, who have more of her blithe and freewheeling spirit.

I wasn't prepared for the fact that grief is so unpredictable. It wasn't just sadness, and it wasn't linear. Somehow I'd thought that the first days would be the worst and then it would get steadily better - like getting over the flu. That's not how it was.

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.

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

'Hamlet' is a play about a man whose grief is deemed unseemly.