And After My Mother's Death

Grief Is At Once A Public And A Private Experience. One's Inner, Inexpressible Disruption Cannot Be Fully Realized In One's Public Persona.

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.

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.

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.

One Of The Things About Grief Is That It Can Bring A Deeper Perspective Into Your Life; In The End, It Has, For Me, Though It's Also Brought Sorrow.