A Mother Is A Story With No

We Have An Idea - A Very Modern Idea - That Dying Is Undignified. But I Think This Is Because We Have The Illusion That We Can Control Our Bodies And Our Fates.

But When My Mother Died, I Found That I Did Not Believe That She Was Gone.

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.

But There Is A Discomfort That Surrounds Grief. It Makes Even The Most Well-intentioned People Unsure Of What To Say. And So Many Of The Freshly Bereaved End Up Feeling Even More Alone.

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.