Meghan O'Rourke
Grief is at once a public and a private experience. One's inner, inexpressible disruption cannot be fully realized in one's public persona.Collection: Grief
I believe in the importance of individuality, but in the midst of grief I also find myself wanting connection - wanting to be reminded that the sadness I feel is not just mine but ours.Collection: Grief
With ferocity and extraordinary craft, Lizzie Harris has made a book of poems that resonates far beyond the personal stories it tells. Stop Wanting reveals, in every lyric, its author's profound metaphorical gifts. In its ironies and intensities, it brings to mind a writer like the young Sylvia Plath, though what is startling about Harris' s work is the way it combines those gifts with a muted, deft self-awareness. Most of all, these are wonderfully shaped, powerful, and surprising poems-a startling debut.Collection: Powerful
And after my mother's death I became more open to and empathetic about other people's struggles and losses.Collection: Mother
My mother never liked Mother's Day. She thought it was a fake holiday dreamed up by Hallmark to commodify deep sentiments that couldn't be expressed with a card.Collection: Mother
Television has never known what to do with grief, which resists narrative: the dramas of grief are largely internal - for the bereaved, it is a chaotic, intense, episodic period, but the chaos is by and large subterranean, and easily appears static to the friendly onlooker who has absorbed the fact of loss and moved on.Collection: Drama
'Hamlet' is a play about a man whose grief is deemed unseemly.Collection: Grief
To mourn is to wonder at the strangeness that grief is not written all over your face in bruised hieroglyphics. And it's also to feel, quite powerfully, that you're not allowed to descend into the deepest fathom of your grief - that to do so would be taboo somehow.Collection: Grief
Much of Hamlet is about the precise kind of slippage the mourner experiences: the difference between being and seeming, the uncertainty about how the inner translates into the outer, the sense that one is expected to perform grief palatably. (If you don’t seem sad, people worry; but if you are grief-stricken, people flinch away from your pain.)Collection: Pain
Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity was wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the loss.Collection: Relationship
But when my mother died, I found that I did not believe that she was gone.Collection: Mother
Loss doesn't feel redeemable. But for me one consoling aspect is the recognition that, in this at least, none of us is different from anyone else: We all lose loved ones; we all face our own death.Collection: Loss
'Hamlet' is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it.Collection: Grief
The people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created.Collection: Memories
Suddenly it was fall, the season of death, the anniversary of things-going-to-hell.Collection: Fall
A mother is beyond any notion of a beginning. That's what makes her a mother.Collection: Mother