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

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

To mourn is to wonder at the strangeness that grief is not written all over your face in bruised hieroglyphics. And it's also to feel, quite powerfully, that you're not allowed to descend into the deepest fathom of your grief - that to do so would be taboo somehow.

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.

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

Loss doesn't feel redeemable. But for me one consoling aspect is the recognition that, in this at least, none of us is different from anyone else: We all lose loved ones; we all face our own death.

Suddenly it was fall, the season of death, the anniversary of things-going-to-hell.