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.

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.

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

I was not raised with religion, and I had no faith before my mother died. On the other hand, when she died, I did not immediately feel she was "gone." I don't believe she is in something like heaven, but I also feel that we don't understand much about the nature of the universe. So I hold on to that uncertainty, at times.

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

But when my mother died, I found that I did not believe that she was gone.

I am the indoctrinated child of two lapsed Irish Catholics. Which is to say: I am not religious.