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.

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.

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.

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

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

But when my mother died, I found that I did not believe that she was gone.

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.)