One word I had throughout the first year and a half of my mother's death was 'unmoored.' I felt that I had no anchor, that I had no home in the world.

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

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

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

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

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

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There is always tension in women's gymnastics between athleticism, grace, performance, and eros.

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Grief is characterized much more by waves of feeling that lessen and reoccur, it's less like stages and more like different states of feeling.

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And after my mother's death I became more open to and empathetic about other people's struggles and losses.

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

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