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

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.

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

After all dying is one of the most profound and difficult experiences we have.

I wasn't prepared for the fact that grief is so unpredictable. It wasn't just sadness, and it wasn't linear. Somehow I'd thought that the first days would be the worst and then it would get steadily better - like getting over the flu. That's not how it was.

Loss is so paradoxical: It is at once enormous and tiny.

While I did a lot of research, I ended up feeling that the best way to write about grief was to describe it from the inside out - the show the strange intensities that come along with it, the peculiar thoughts, the longing for that past - all the strange moments of thinking you glimpse the dead person on the street, or in your dreams.