If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.

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

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

My mother never liked Mother's Day. She thought it was a fake holiday dreamed up by Hallmark to commodify deep sentiments that couldn't be expressed with a card.

My whole life, I had been taught to read and study, to seek understanding in knowledge of history, of cultures.

Time doesn’t obey our commands. You cannot make it holy just because it is disappearing.

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.