Meghan O'Rourke

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.

Many Americans don't mourn in public anymore - we don't wear black, we don't beat our chests and wail.

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

But when my mother died, I found that I did not believe that she was gone.

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

'Hamlet' is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it.

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.

'Hamlet' is a play about a man whose grief is deemed unseemly.

Grief is a bad moon, a sleeper wave. It's like having an inner combatant, a saboteur who, at the slightest change in the sunlight, or at the first notes of a jingle for a dog food commercial, will flick the memory switch, bringing tears to your eyes.

Loss is so paradoxical: It is at once enormous and tiny.

A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without sky: unimaginable.

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

A mother is beyond any notion of a beginning. That's what makes her a mother.

I live to collect information, and I am also a perfectionist.

Loss doesn't feel redeemable. But for me one consoling aspect is the recognition that, in this at least, none of us is different from anyone else: We all lose loved ones; we all face our own death.

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.

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

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.

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

I think about my mother every day. But usually the thoughts are fleeting - she crosses my mind like a spring cardinal that flies past the edge of your eye: startling, luminous, lovely... gone.

One of the ideas I've clung to most of my life is that if I just try hard enough it will work out.

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.

The truth is, I need to experience my mother's presence in the world around me and not just in my head.

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.