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

Suddenly it was fall, the season of death, the anniversary of things-going-to-hell.

'Hamlet' is a play about a man whose grief is deemed unseemly.

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.

One of the grubby truths about a loss is that you don't just mourn the dead person, you mourn the person you got to be when the lost one was alive. This loss might even be what affects you the most.

It's all too easy when talking about female gymnasts to fall into the trap of infantilizing them, spending more time worrying more about female vulnerability than we do celebrating female strength.

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