Meghan O'Rourke Quotes
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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.
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But when my mother died, I found that I did not believe that she was gone.
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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.
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If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.
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Many Americans don't mourn in public anymore - we don't wear black, we don't beat our chests and wail.
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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.
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Like my mother before me, I have always been a good speller.
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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.
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A mother is beyond any notion of a beginning. That's what makes her a mother.
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Grief is a bad moon, a sleeper wave. It's like having an inner combatant, a saboteur who, at the slightest change in the sunlight, or at the first notes of a jingle for a dog food commercial, will flick the memory switch, bringing tears to your eyes.
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Loss is so paradoxical: It is at once enormous and tiny.
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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.
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My whole life, I had been taught to read and study, to seek understanding in knowledge of history, of cultures.
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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.
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What's endlessly complicated in thinking about women's gymnastics is the way that vulnerability and power are threaded through the sport.
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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.
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Writing has always been the primary way I make sense of the world.
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I'm not much like my mother; that role falls to my brothers, who have more of her blithe and freewheeling spirit.
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'Hamlet' is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it.
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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.
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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.
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Grief is at once a public and a private experience. One's inner, inexpressible disruption cannot be fully realized in one's public persona.
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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.
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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.