All love stories are tales of beginnings. When we talk about falling in love, we go to the beginning, to pinpoint the moment of freefall.

'Hamlet' is a play about a man whose grief is deemed unseemly.

I think about my mother every day. But usually the thoughts are fleeting - she crosses my mind like a spring cardinal that flies past the edge of your eye: startling, luminous, lovely... gone.

The truth is, I need to experience my mother's presence in the world around me and not just in my head.

Loss doesn't feel redeemable. But for me one consoling aspect is the recognition that, in this at least, none of us is different from anyone else: We all lose loved ones; we all face our own death.

Sometimes you don't even know what you want until you find out you can't have it.

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.