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.

Grief is at once a public and a private experience. One's inner, inexpressible disruption cannot be fully realized in one's public persona.

One of the ideas I've clung to most of my life is that if I just try hard enough it will work out.

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.

Much of Hamlet is about the precise kind of slippage the mourner experiences: the difference between being and seeming, the uncertainty about how the inner translates into the outer, the sense that one is expected to perform grief palatably. (If you don’t seem sad, people worry; but if you are grief-stricken, people flinch away from your pain.)

The truth is, I need to experience my mother's presence in the world around me and not just in my head.

Faith does help mourners survive their loss, some studies suggest; but I imagine one still struggles.