Faith does help mourners survive their loss, some studies suggest; but I imagine one still struggles.

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

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

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.

Yet the story of Orpheus, it occurs to me, is not just about the desire of the living to resuscitate the dead but about the ways in which the dead drag us along into their shadowy realm because we cannot let them go. So we follow them into the Underworld, descending, descending, until one day we turn and make our way back.

And after my mother's death I became more open to and empathetic about other people's struggles and losses.

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.