But When My Mother Died,

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.

Writing Has Always Been The Primary Way I Make Sense Of The World.

Sometimes You Don't Even Know What You Want Until You Find Out You Can't Have It.

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

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.