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.

I envy my Jewish friends the ritual of saying kaddish - a ritual that seems perfectly conceived, with its built-in support group and its ceremonious designation of time each day devoted to remembering the lost person.

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.)

One of the things about grief is that it can bring a deeper perspective into your life; in the end, it has, for me, though it's also brought sorrow.

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

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

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