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.

There is always tension in women's gymnastics between athleticism, grace, performance, and eros.

There are many kinds of loss embedded in a loss - the loss of the person, and the loss of the self you got to be with that person. And the seeming loss of the past, which now feels forever out of reach.

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.)

My whole life, I had been taught to read and study, to seek understanding in knowledge of history, of cultures.

If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.

It's a blessing not to be alone in your grief but it's also painful to see your parents and siblings in pain.