My mother never liked Mother's Day. She thought it was a fake holiday dreamed up by Hallmark to commodify deep sentiments that couldn't be expressed with a card.

I think about my mother every day. But usually the thoughts are fleeting - she crosses my mind like a spring cardinal that flies past the edge of your eye: startling, luminous, lovely... gone.

Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me.

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

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

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

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

A mother is the portal by which you enter the world.

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