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.

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

Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me.

Grief is characterized much more by waves of feeling that lessen and reoccur, it's less like stages and more like different states of feeling.

I am the indoctrinated child of two lapsed Irish Catholics. Which is to say: I am not religious.

One word I had throughout the first year and a half of my mother's death was 'unmoored.' I felt that I had no anchor, that I had no home in the world.

This is part of the complexity of grief: A piece of you recognizes it is an extreme state, an altered state, yet a large part of you is entirely subject to its demands.