But When My Mother Died, I Found

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.

Like My Mother Before Me, I Have Always Been A Good Speller.

The Truth Is, I Need To Experience My Mother's Presence In The World Around Me And Not Just In My Head.

It's All Too Easy When Talking About Female Gymnasts To Fall Into The Trap Of Infantilizing Them, Spending More Time Worrying More About Female Vulnerability Than We Do Celebrating Female Strength.

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.