A Mother Is The Portal

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.

I Was Not Raised With Religion, And I Had No Faith Before My Mother Died. On The Other Hand, When She Died, I Did Not Immediately Feel She Was "gone." I Don't Believe She Is In Something Like Heaven, But I Also Feel That We Don't Understand Much About The Nature Of The Universe. So I Hold On To That Uncertainty, At Times.

While I Did A Lot Of Research, I Ended Up Feeling That The Best Way To Write About Grief Was To Describe It From The Inside Out - The Show The Strange Intensities That Come Along With It, The Peculiar Thoughts, The Longing For That Past - All The Strange Moments Of Thinking You Glimpse The Dead Person On The Street, Or In Your Dreams.

Nothing Prepared Me For The Loss Of My Mother. Even Knowing That She Would Die Did Not Prepare Me.

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.