After my mother died at the age of 55, in 2008, I wrote a book about mourning. I read through scholarly texts and novels and poems that touched explicitly on grief. In the process, I learned how physical it is, causing changes in cortisol levels, memory, sleep, and appetite; leaving the mourner exhausted, scattered, struggling to resume “normalcy.” But perhaps the key thing I learned is that grief needs a vessel: It needs language, it needs lamentation, it needs expression, it needs demarcation in time; it demands a pause in everyday activity. My mother died on Christmas Day. I recall the shock of comfort in having my mother’s sisters and brother gather with us a few days later, the “small, good thing,” as Raymond Carver put it, of sharing bread, wine, and stories late into the night. Their presence was soothing: the light in their faces, their enduringness. 

– Meghan O’Rourke