Meghan O'Rourke Quotes
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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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Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me.
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There is always tension in women's gymnastics between athleticism, grace, performance, and eros.
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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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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.
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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.
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My mother died of metastatic colorectal cancer shortly before three P.M. on Christmas Day of 2008. I don't know the exact time of her death, because none of us thought to look at a clock for a while after she stopped breathing.
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And after my mother's death I became more open to and empathetic about other people's struggles and losses.
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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.
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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.
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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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One of the ideas I've clung to most of my life is that if I just try hard enough it will work out.
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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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I am the indoctrinated child of two lapsed Irish Catholics. Which is to say: I am not religious.
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The truth is, I need to experience my mother's presence in the world around me and not just in my head.
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I live to collect information, and I am also a perfectionist.
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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.