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

If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.

One word I had throughout the first year and a half of my mother's death was 'unmoored.' I felt that I had no anchor, that I had no home in the world.

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.

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

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

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.