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

Like my mother before me, I have always been a good speller.

I'm not much like my mother; that role falls to my brothers, who have more of her blithe and freewheeling spirit.

I envy my Jewish friends the ritual of saying kaddish - a ritual that seems perfectly conceived, with its built-in support group and its ceremonious designation of time each day devoted to remembering the lost person.

There is no single way of grieving. But research suggests that there are some broad similarities among grievers.

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.

Many grievers experience intense yearning or longing after a death - more than they experience, say, denial.