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.)

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

I have seen that grief can be very different for different people. While the range of emotions experienced is similar, the way we deal with those emotions isn't, necessarily.

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

The truth is, I need to experience my mother's presence in the world around me and not just in my head.

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.

Time doesn’t obey our commands. You cannot make it holy just because it is disappearing.