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.

Sometimes you don't even know what you want until you find out you can't have it.

Be patient with yourself. Don't make the loss harder by thinking you should be a certain way, or have bounced back, etc.

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.)

Grief is at once a public and a private experience. One's inner, inexpressible disruption cannot be fully realized in one's public persona.

Many grievers experience intense yearning or longing after a death - more than they experience, say, denial.

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.