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

Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity was wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the loss.

A mother is the portal by which you enter the world.

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.

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.

When my mother was sick, I found myself needing to put down in my journals all sorts of things - to try to understand them, and, I think, to try to remember them.