A mother is a story with no beginning. That is what defines her.

A mother is the portal by which you enter the world.

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.

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

To mourn is to wonder at the strangeness that grief is not written all over your face in bruised hieroglyphics. And it's also to feel, quite powerfully, that you're not allowed to descend into the deepest fathom of your grief - that to do so would be taboo somehow.

One of the ideas I've clung to most of my life is that if I just try hard enough it will work out.

Many Americans don't mourn in public anymore - we don't wear black, we don't beat our chests and wail.