Hey Joe. Here’s an interesting article on grief from earlier this year at The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/02/01/100201crat_atlarge_orourke
kinda debunks the stage theory… turns out grief is a bit messy, and we humans don’t really follow the rules.

I also read an interesting essay by Judith Butler, “Violence, Mourning and Politics” from Precarious Life. It’s a bit esoteric, but one passage really resonated with me:

“When we lose certain people….we may simply feel that we are undergoing something temporary, that mourning will be over and some restoration of prior order will be achieved. But maybe when we undergo what we do, something about who we are is revealed, something that delineates the ties we have to others, that shows us that these ties constitute what we are, ties or bonds that compose us. It is not as if an “I” exists independently over here and then simply loses a “you” over there, especially if the attachment to “you” is part of what composes who “I” am. If I lose you, under these conditions, than I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. Who “am” I without you? When we lose some of these ties by which we are constituted, we do not know who we are or what to do. On one level, I think I have lost “you” only to discover that “I” have gone missing as well. “

And as a person who is going on, omg 32 years without my mother… it does not get “better” with time. It gets different. And know that you are not alone.