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.

My theory is this: Women falter when they're called on to be highly self-conscious about their talents. Not when they're called on to enact them.

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.

I'm not much like my mother; that role falls to my brothers, who have more of her blithe and freewheeling spirit.

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

There is no single way of grieving. But research suggests that there are some broad similarities among grievers.

I envy my Jewish friends the ritual of saying kaddish - a ritual that seems perfectly conceived, with its built-in support group and its ceremonious designation of time each day devoted to remembering the lost person.