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

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

One of the grubby truths about a loss is that you don't just mourn the dead person, you mourn the person you got to be when the lost one was alive. This loss might even be what affects you the most.

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.)

For sure, the funeral industry seems intensely cynical to me and I don't think it is HELPING people mourn.

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.

Many grievers experience intense yearning or longing after a death - more than they experience, say, denial.