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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Like my mother before me, I have always been a good speller.
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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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A mother is beyond any notion of a beginning. That's what makes her a mother.
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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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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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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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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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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 is so paradoxical: It is at once enormous and tiny.
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Writing has always been the primary way I make sense of the world.
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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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'Hamlet' is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it.
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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 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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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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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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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.
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Our minds are mysterious; our conscious brain is like a ship on a sea that is obscure to us.
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'Hamlet' is a play about a man whose grief is deemed unseemly.