Michael Kelly's Mom with some extremely touching words:

Parents have the most exhilarating, amusing, creative job in the world, and the most exhausting, demanding, relentless one, too. Somehow they are expected to do their best, day after day, even when they're scrambling to pay the rent or hold their marriage together or work for a wretched boss.

I've answered questions on everything from addictions to bed-wetting, day care to college, self-confidence to sex, but this time I'm the one with the problem and I don't know how to solve it.

Our only son, Mike -- an embedded journalist in Iraq -- was rushing toward Baghdad Airport on April 3 when his Humvee was ambushed, causing it to flip upside down and fall into a canal. Death was quick, but grief, I find, keeps going on and on and on and it affects me in strange ways.

I feel no denial. No anger. No bargaining. No depression. And this makes me wonder if I'll ever get to peace and acceptance. These five classic stages of grief, cited so authoritatively by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, aren't working for me.

Instead my grief is amorphous, deceitful, unpredictable. Sometimes it hides behind distractions; sometimes it covers my spirits like the pall on Mike's coffin, and sometimes it knocks me flat, particularly when I think of Mike's beloved wife, Max, and their little boys, Tom, 7, and Jack, 3, who must live their lives without him.