As I move along my grief journey, I continue to find the days unpredictable. Every once in a while I fall apart for no discernable reason, sobbing when driving by myself, yelling when I’m alone in the house, spent from raw emotion, struggling to pull myself together for phone calls and outings to the grocery store. Other days I feel calmer. I exercise, I rest, I get work done. On these more functional days, I often find myself moving deliberately and methodically through the hours. I ponder what I want to do until options come to mind, then I choose one, then I actually do it, then I take a moment to acknowledge what I’ve done, then I consider the next thing, and so on. I keep thinking about

I am a goal-oriented person. I think this is because I have a gene for it, although it may be a combination of nature and nurture. My mother, who taught preschool, suspects that she encouraged it by bringing Montessori principles into her parenting – specifically, when as a youngster I was engaged in a task, she tried to always let me finish it before directing me to do something else. Mom, let’s just say you can count this effort among your many parenting successes. We live in a goal-oriented era, and some of us reside in particularly goal-oriented countries and cultures, with some areas (like mine) even more exceptionally goal-oriented than others. Suffice it to say that many of us modern