All love stories are tales of beginnings. When we talk about falling in love, we go to the beginning, to pinpoint the moment of freefall.
Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me.
When my mother was sick, I found myself needing to put down in my journals all sorts of things - to try to understand them, and, I think, to try to remember them.
I am the indoctrinated child of two lapsed Irish Catholics. Which is to say: I am not religious.
Grief is at once a public and a private experience. One's inner, inexpressible disruption cannot be fully realized in one's public persona.
Our minds are mysterious; our conscious brain is like a ship on a sea that is obscure to us.
There is always tension in women's gymnastics between athleticism, grace, performance, and eros.
My mother died of metastatic colorectal cancer shortly before three P.M. on Christmas Day of 2008. I don't know the exact time of her death, because none of us thought to look at a clock for a while after she stopped breathing.
Many Americans don't mourn in public anymore - we don't wear black, we don't beat our chests and wail.
I wasn't prepared for the fact that grief is so unpredictable. It wasn't just sadness, and it wasn't linear. Somehow I'd thought that the first days would be the worst and then it would get steadily better - like getting over the flu. That's not how it was.
Grief is characterized much more by waves of feeling that lessen and reoccur, it's less like stages and more like different states of feeling.
I believe in the importance of individuality, but in the midst of grief I also find myself wanting connection - wanting to be reminded that the sadness I feel is not just mine but ours.
This is part of the complexity of grief: A piece of you recognizes it is an extreme state, an altered state, yet a large part of you is entirely subject to its demands.
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.
'Hamlet' is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it.
If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.
A death from a long illness is very different from a sudden death. It gives you time to say goodbye and time to adjust to the idea that the beloved will not be with you anymore.
Television has never known what to do with grief, which resists narrative: the dramas of grief are largely internal - for the bereaved, it is a chaotic, intense, episodic period, but the chaos is by and large subterranean, and easily appears static to the friendly onlooker who has absorbed the fact of loss and moved on.
'Hamlet' is a play about a man whose grief is deemed unseemly.
Writing has always been the primary way I make sense of the world.
