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

After all dying is one of the most profound and difficult experiences we have.

And after my mother's death I became more open to and empathetic about other people's struggles and losses.

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

Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity was wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the loss.

When my mother was sick, I found myself needing to put down in my journals all sorts of things - to try to understand them, and, I think, to try to remember them.

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.)