A Mother Is The Portal By Which

One Of The Difficulties With Grief Research Is That It Risks Making Certain Kinds Of Grief Seem Normal And Others Abnormal - And Of Course Having A Sense Of The Contours Of Grief Is, I Think, Truly Useful, One Has To Remember It's Not A Science, It's An Individual Reckoning, Which Science Is Just Trying To Help Us Describe.

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.

After All Dying Is One Of The Most Profound And Difficult Experiences We Have.

I Have Seen That Grief Can Be Very Different For Different People. While The Range Of Emotions Experienced Is Similar, The Way We Deal With Those Emotions Isn't, Necessarily.

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.