A death from a long illness is very different from a sudden death. It gives you time to say goodbye and time to adjust to the idea that the beloved will not be with you anymore.

Many Americans don't mourn in public anymore - we don't wear black, we don't beat our chests and wail.

My mother died of metastatic colorectal cancer shortly before three P.M. on Christmas Day of 2008. I don't know the exact time of her death, because none of us thought to look at a clock for a while after she stopped breathing.

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.

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.

Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity was wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the loss.