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

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.

I think that grief is a profound spiritual, metaphysical, and - oddly - physical reckoning with death, which we don't understand well. It's both the process by which you relearn the world in the absence of someone who was a pillar in it, and the process in which you confront the reality of death.

Be patient with yourself. Don't make the loss harder by thinking you should be a certain way, or have bounced back, etc.

My theory is this: Women falter when they're called on to be highly self-conscious about their talents. Not when they're called on to enact them.

Writing has always been the primary way I make sense of the world.

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