Meghan O'Rourke
I think about my mother every day. But usually the thoughts are fleeting - she crosses my mind like a spring cardinal that flies past the edge of your eye: startling, luminous, lovely... gone.Collection: Mother
I wasn't prepared for the fact that grief is so unpredictable. It wasn't just sadness, and it wasn't linear. Somehow I'd thought that the first days would be the worst and then it would get steadily better - like getting over the flu. That's not how it was.Collection: Grief
One word I had throughout the first year and a half of my mother's death was 'unmoored.' I felt that I had no anchor, that I had no home in the world.Collection: Mother
One of the things about grief is that it can bring a deeper perspective into your life; in the end, it has, for me, though it's also brought sorrow.Collection: Grief
All love stories are tales of beginnings. When we talk about falling in love, we go to the beginning, to pinpoint the moment of freefall.Collection: Falling In Love
Yet the story of Orpheus, it occurs to me, is not just about the desire of the living to resuscitate the dead but about the ways in which the dead drag us along into their shadowy realm because we cannot let them go. So we follow them into the Underworld, descending, descending, until one day we turn and make our way back.Collection: Desire
A mother is the portal by which you enter the world.Collection: Mother
Sometimes you don't even know what you want until you find out you can't have it.Collection: Want
A mother is a story with no beginning. That is what defines her.Collection: Mother
Grief is characterized much more by waves of feeling that lessen and reoccur, it's less like stages and more like different states of feeling.Collection: Grief
There are many kinds of loss embedded in a loss - the loss of the person, and the loss of the self you got to be with that person. And the seeming loss of the past, which now feels forever out of reach.Collection: Loss
Writing has always been the primary way I make sense of the world.Collection: Writing
If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.Collection: Grief
We have an idea - a very modern idea - that dying is undignified. But I think this is because we have the illusion that we can control our bodies and our fates.Collection: Fate
Funerals cost so much money, and are likely to be an additional source of stress in this recession - it's sad that we don't have a more humane, less commercialized way to approach burial.Collection: Stress
I am the indoctrinated child of two lapsed Irish Catholics. Which is to say: I am not religious.Collection: Religious
I think that grief is a profound spiritual, metaphysical, and - oddly - physical reckoning with death, which we don't understand well. It's both the process by which you relearn the world in the absence of someone who was a pillar in it, and the process in which you confront the reality of death.Collection: Spiritual
The truth is, I need to experience my mother's presence in the world around me and not just in my head.Collection: Mother
I envy my Jewish friends the ritual of saying kaddish - a ritual that seems perfectly conceived, with its built-in support group and its ceremonious designation of time each day devoted to remembering the lost person.Collection: Envy
There is always tension in women's gymnastics between athleticism, grace, performance, and eros.Collection: Gymnastics
One of the grubby truths about a loss is that you don't just mourn the dead person, you mourn the person you got to be when the lost one was alive. This loss might even be what affects you the most.Collection: Loss
It's a blessing not to be alone in your grief but it's also painful to see your parents and siblings in pain.Collection: Pain
When my mother was sick, I found myself needing to put down in my journals all sorts of things - to try to understand them, and, I think, to try to remember them.Collection: Mother
A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without sky: unimaginable.Collection: Mother
What had happened still seemed implausible. A person was present your entire life, and then one day she disappeared and never came back. It resisted belief.Collection: One Day
Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me.Collection: Mother
Loss is so paradoxical: It is at once enormous and tiny.Collection: Loss
I'm not much like my mother; that role falls to my brothers, who have more of her blithe and freewheeling spirit.Collection: Mother
Like my mother before me, I have always been a good speller.Collection: Mother
Time doesn’t obey our commands. You cannot make it holy just because it is disappearing.Collection: Holy
This is part of the complexity of grief: A piece of you recognizes it is an extreme state, an altered state, yet a large part of you is entirely subject to its demands.Collection: Grief
My theory is this: Women falter when they're called on to be highly self-conscious about their talents. Not when they're called on to enact them.Collection: Self
After all dying is one of the most profound and difficult experiences we have.Collection: Profound
For sure, the funeral industry seems intensely cynical to me and I don't think it is HELPING people mourn.Collection: Thinking
Be patient with yourself. Don't make the loss harder by thinking you should be a certain way, or have bounced back, etc.Collection: Loss
Faith does help mourners survive their loss, some studies suggest; but I imagine one still struggles.Collection: Struggle
I was not raised with religion, and I had no faith before my mother died. On the other hand, when she died, I did not immediately feel she was "gone." I don't believe she is in something like heaven, but I also feel that we don't understand much about the nature of the universe. So I hold on to that uncertainty, at times.Collection: Mother
Many researchers say the dominant emotion experienced after loss is yearning or searching. And while you might feel more anger early on, it's accompanied by a whole host of other feelings.Collection: Loss
I have seen that grief can be very different for different people. While the range of emotions experienced is similar, the way we deal with those emotions isn't, necessarily.Collection: Grief
While I did a lot of research, I ended up feeling that the best way to write about grief was to describe it from the inside out - the show the strange intensities that come along with it, the peculiar thoughts, the longing for that past - all the strange moments of thinking you glimpse the dead person on the street, or in your dreams.Collection: Dream
One of the difficulties with grief research is that it risks making certain kinds of grief seem normal and others abnormal - and of course having a sense of the contours of grief is, I think, truly useful, one has to remember it's not a science, it's an individual reckoning, which science is just trying to help us describe.Collection: Grief
There is no single way of grieving. But research suggests that there are some broad similarities among grievers.Collection: Grieving
Many grievers experience intense yearning or longing after a death - more than they experience, say, denial.Collection: Denial
My whole life, I had been taught to read and study, to seek understanding in knowledge of history, of cultures.Collection: Understanding
What's endlessly complicated in thinking about women's gymnastics is the way that vulnerability and power are threaded through the sport.Collection: Sports
I live to collect information, and I am also a perfectionist.Collection: Information
It's all too easy when talking about female gymnasts to fall into the trap of infantilizing them, spending more time worrying more about female vulnerability than we do celebrating female strength.Collection: Fall
Our minds are mysterious; our conscious brain is like a ship on a sea that is obscure to us.Collection: Sea
One of the ideas I've clung to most of my life is that if I just try hard enough it will work out.Collection: Ideas
But there is a discomfort that surrounds grief. It makes even the most well-intentioned people unsure of what to say. And so many of the freshly bereaved end up feeling even more alone.Collection: Grief