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

What had happened still seemed implausible. A person was present your entire life, and then one day she disappeared and never came back. It resisted belief.

Many Americans don't mourn in public anymore - we don't wear black, we don't beat our chests and wail.

My theory is this: Women falter when they're called on to be highly self-conscious about their talents. Not when they're called on to enact them.

What's endlessly complicated in thinking about women's gymnastics is the way that vulnerability and power are threaded through the sport.

Television has never known what to do with grief, which resists narrative: the dramas of grief are largely internal - for the bereaved, it is a chaotic, intense, episodic period, but the chaos is by and large subterranean, and easily appears static to the friendly onlooker who has absorbed the fact of loss and moved on.

Our minds are mysterious; our conscious brain is like a ship on a sea that is obscure to us.