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

Grief is a bad moon, a sleeper wave. It's like having an inner combatant, a saboteur who, at the slightest change in the sunlight, or at the first notes of a jingle for a dog food commercial, will flick the memory switch, bringing tears to your eyes.

The people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created.

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.

My mother died of metastatic colorectal cancer shortly before three P.M. on Christmas Day of 2008. I don't know the exact time of her death, because none of us thought to look at a clock for a while after she stopped breathing.

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

'Hamlet' is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it.