Meghan O'Rourke Quotes
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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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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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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.
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'Hamlet' is a play about a man whose grief is deemed unseemly.
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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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And after my mother's death I became more open to and empathetic about other people's struggles and losses.
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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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There is always tension in women's gymnastics between athleticism, grace, performance, and eros.
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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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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.