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

It's all too easy when talking about female gymnasts to fall into the trap of infantilizing them, spending more time worrying more about female vulnerability than we do celebrating female strength.

I am the indoctrinated child of two lapsed Irish Catholics. Which is to say: I am not religious.

Grief is characterized much more by waves of feeling that lessen and reoccur, it's less like stages and more like different states of feeling.

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

There is no single way of grieving. But research suggests that there are some broad similarities among grievers.

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.