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

For sure, the funeral industry seems intensely cynical to me and I don't think it is HELPING people mourn.

A mother is beyond any notion of a beginning. That's what makes her a mother.

One of the difficulties with grief research is that it risks making certain kinds of grief seem normal and others abnormal - and of course having a sense of the contours of grief is, I think, truly useful, one has to remember it's not a science, it's an individual reckoning, which science is just trying to help us describe.

When my mother was sick, I found myself needing to put down in my journals all sorts of things - to try to understand them, and, I think, to try to remember them.

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