They tell you time will heal.

They tell you God only gives us what we can handle.

They tell you all those platitudes that really don't apply and that really don't help.

(Ann claps) My name is Ann Hood, and this is my take on coping with grief.

April of 2002 was an incredibly unusually hot month for New England.

And what I didn't know but would later learn is that spike in temperature did something strange to the strep virus, the one that you usually get strep throat from and that kids did get strep throat from.

My son had it, I had it, my daughter Grace had it.

But hers was the virulent kind that they call galloping strep.

And she spiked a fever, so I rushed her to the emergency room, but within hours, I found myself in the ICU with a doctor looking me in the face and saying, "Your daughter's not gonna make it."

She was in the hospital for 36 hours before she died on April 18th.

Part of what writers do is make sense out of chaos, whether we're writing fiction or nonfiction.

But when Grace died, I couldn't make sense of it.

And writing required that, requires it of writers.

So every time someone handed me a notebook or just gave me that advice, "I hope you're writing this down," or, "Please write this down," or, "You'll feel better if you write about it," I could just shake my head, because they didn't understand that I couldn't read a sentence in "People Magazine".

I couldn't pay attention to a movie, I couldn't follow the plot.

My brain was not processing the way it had for my entire life up until that time.

I think people, wonderful people, want to fix everything.

You know when you call a friend, you have a broken heart or you don't know what to do about your job or any kind of thing that happens in your life, you call someone for advice and they wanna help you, they wanna fix it, they wanna come up with a solution to make your life easier and better.

But when you lose someone, and I have to say, losing your five-year-old daughter, maybe in particular, they can't fix it.

No one can fix it.

I always say that six months later, when I learned how to knit, it brought my concentration back, because I'm not very crafty, and I had to think so hard to get, you know, seven stitches done correctly.

But that kind of allowed me to start reading again, because I was, like, training my brain how to think and concentrate again.

And slowly, slowly, I began to write again.

And so I wrote an essay called "Comfort", that became my memoir, "Comfort", about the lies people tell you when you're grieving.

And I wrote it with my responses to them, the things I wished I had the courage or the nerve or the energy to say, but I just couldn't.

So, as a writer, I wrote them down instead.

For me, and I think for many other people, your brain is like an old VCR stuck on replay, where it keeps replaying the hours leading up to what happened.

And for me, those hours began in the emergency room.

And I would start there and I would just replay it, replay it, and of course, the end of that loop is Grace dying.

And as much as people had told me, "Write it down, it might help," it did help to explore grief.

And after I wrote "The Knitting Circle", the novel, I started writing about grief in my fiction, so that I was writing and exploring different aspects of grief with distance, and that distance kind of opened the door.

Now when I think of her, I almost never think of the hospital.

I always think of her as she was.

My advice to someone who's grieving, perhaps just started grieving, is that there's no rule book for this.

There's no roadmap to follow.

You know what you feel and you know what you need.

And don't try to please the people around you by doing what they think you need.

It's really, really important to understand what will help you.

And I know there are times you feel like nothing will help you, and in those times, it is okay to give in to crying or avoiding people or whatever you have to do.

Don't fall into the misleading idea that there's a way out, that everyone has the same way out of this.

My advice to someone who wants to help a friend or a relative who's grieving is kind of twofold.

Do something extraordinary and do something small.

Something extraordinary, I have a friend in New York City who just felt so terrible that she wasn't near me after Grace died, that we had all these miles between us.

And one day, she just drove those three and a half hours and showed up with lunch for me, and it made me feel good for days, that someone did that extraordinary thing.

Another friend stayed away respectfully, didn't call, but she sent me a card every day for 30 days.

So, every day I knew that she was thinking of me.

Show up in whatever way you can, and don't expect anything from the person who's grieving.

Do those things that are comforting.

We all know how it is to be comforted and what we need.

Think of that and do that for them.

My name is Ann Hood, and this has been my take on coping with grief.