“Your mother loved you very much,” my dad said. I already knew what he would say next. I felt my head throb, and the tears well, and the blood rush to my hot, flushed cheeks. I was 14.

Grief was weird and confusing to me then, and it still is now nearly 10 years later. The day after my mom passed away, I made myself go to school. Surrounding myself with people and activities and stuff seemed easier than sitting alone in my room dwelling on what had just happened. But then there were days when I didn’t feel like going to school at all—I wanted to sit on the floor of my shower and cry, or totally disconnect from the world around me by losing myself in the fictional world of a book, TV show, or movie. These alternate universes allowed me to escape—sometimes for a few hours, sometimes for just a few moments—and they helped me feel less alone without requiring me to publicly experience my grief.

I don’t know what I watched. Because honestly, what do you watch when you’re a 14-year-old whose mom just died? What do you watch when you’re anyone who’s lost a loved one of any kind? There’s no life map for that kind of grief; you just have to live each day and keep living each day until eventually, maybe, things stop hurting as much.

I like having a way forward, though—or at least knowing where I can find a rest stop or two when I need to get away from the sadness and grief. So I asked other women what movies they’ve turned to in times of loss and what kind of emotional respite those movies gave them. Because again, it’s hard to know what to watch when you’ve lost someone so close to you. And sometimes, you don’t know what to watch at all. Sometimes, you just turn on the TV or head to the movie theater, and you find something. And sometimes, that something just happens to help.