One of the grubby truths about a loss is that you don't just mourn the dead person, you mourn the person you got to be when the lost one was alive. This loss might even be what affects you most.
Many Americans don't mourn in public anymore - we don't wear black, we don't beat our chests and wail.
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.
Grief is at once a public and a private experience. One's inner, inexpressible disruption cannot be fully realized in one's public persona.
My theory is this: Women falter when they're called on to be highly self-conscious about their talents. Not when they're called on to enact them.
If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.
