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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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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But when my mother died, I found that I did not believe that she was gone.
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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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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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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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If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.
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Loss is so paradoxical: It is at once enormous and tiny.
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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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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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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, 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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A death from a long illness is very different from a sudden death. It gives you time to say goodbye and time to adjust to the idea that the beloved will not be with you anymore.
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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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A mother is beyond any notion of a beginning. That's what makes her a mother.
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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.
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Writing has always been the primary way I make sense of the world.
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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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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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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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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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'Hamlet' is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it.
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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.