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

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

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.

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

My mother never liked Mother's Day. She thought it was a fake holiday dreamed up by Hallmark to commodify deep sentiments that couldn't be expressed with a card.

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.)

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