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 Americans don't mourn in public anymore - we don't wear black, we don't beat our chests and wail.

Television has never known what to do with grief, which resists narrative: the dramas of grief are largely internal - for the bereaved, it is a chaotic, intense, episodic period, but the chaos is by and large subterranean, and easily appears static to the friendly onlooker who has absorbed the fact of loss and moved on.

Loss doesn't feel redeemable. But for me one consoling aspect is the recognition that, in this at least, none of us is different from anyone else: We all lose loved ones; we all face our own death.

One of the ideas I've clung to most of my life is that if I just try hard enough it will work out.

A mother is a story with no beginning. That is what defines her.

Yet the story of Orpheus, it occurs to me, is not just about the desire of the living to resuscitate the dead but about the ways in which the dead drag us along into their shadowy realm because we cannot let them go. So we follow them into the Underworld, descending, descending, until one day we turn and make our way back.