So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.

Well the themes for me were and remain sex and love and grief and death - the things that make us and undo us, create and destroy, how we breed and disappear and the emotional context that surrounds these events.

There's no easy way to do this. So do it right: weep, laugh, watch, pray, love, live, give thanks and praise; comfort, mend, honor, and remember.

Grief is the price we pay for being close to one another. If we want to avoid our grief, we simply avoid each other.

A good funeral gets the dead where they need to go and the living where they need to be.

Grief is the tax we pay on our attachments.

Whatever's there to feel, feel it—the riddance, the relief, the fright and freedom, the fear of forgetting, the dull ache of your own mortality. Get with someone you can trust with tears, with anger, and wonderment and utter silence.