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

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.

I have seen that grief can be very different for different people. While the range of emotions experienced is similar, the way we deal with those emotions isn't, necessarily.

To mourn is to wonder at the strangeness that grief is not written all over your face in bruised hieroglyphics. And it's also to feel, quite powerfully, that you're not allowed to descend into the deepest fathom of your grief - that to do so would be taboo somehow.

I live to collect information, and I am also a perfectionist.

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.

'Hamlet' is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it.