Meghan O'Rourke Quotes

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.

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.

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.

There is always tension in women's gymnastics between athleticism, grace, performance, and eros.

The people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created.

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.

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.

One of the ideas I've clung to most of my life is that if I just try hard enough it will work out.

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.

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.

One of the things about grief is that it can bring a deeper perspective into your life; in the end, it has, for me, though it's also brought sorrow.

It's a blessing not to be alone in your grief but it's also painful to see your parents and siblings in pain.

Sometimes you don't even know what you want until you find out you can't have it.

One of the grubby truths about a loss is that you don't just mourn the dead person, you mourn the person you got to be when the lost one was alive. This loss might even be what affects you the most.

What had happened still seemed implausible. A person was present your entire life, and then one day she disappeared and never came back. It resisted belief.

If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.

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.

Many Americans don't mourn in public anymore - we don't wear black, we don't beat our chests and wail.

Many grievers experience intense yearning or longing after a death - more than they experience, say, denial.

I'm not much like my mother; that role falls to my brothers, who have more of her blithe and freewheeling spirit.

Like my mother before me, I have always been a good speller.

Loss is so paradoxical: It is at once enormous and tiny.

Grief is at once a public and a private experience. One's inner, inexpressible disruption cannot be fully realized in one's public persona.

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.

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.

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.

Faith does help mourners survive their loss, some studies suggest; but I imagine one still struggles.

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.

'Hamlet' is a play about a man whose grief is deemed unseemly.

After all dying is one of the most profound and difficult experiences we have.

I have seen that grief can be very different for different people. While the range of emotions experienced is similar, the way we deal with those emotions isn't, necessarily.

Many researchers say the dominant emotion experienced after loss is yearning or searching. And while you might feel more anger early on, it's accompanied by a whole host of other feelings.

For sure, the funeral industry seems intensely cynical to me and I don't think it is HELPING people mourn.

There is no single way of grieving. But research suggests that there are some broad similarities among grievers.

Be patient with yourself. Don't make the loss harder by thinking you should be a certain way, or have bounced back, etc.

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.

A mother is the portal by which you enter the world.

A mother is a story with no beginning. That is what defines her.

Writing has always been the primary way I make sense of the world.

We have an idea - a very modern idea - that dying is undignified. But I think this is because we have the illusion that we can control our bodies and our fates.

Funerals cost so much money, and are likely to be an additional source of stress in this recession - it's sad that we don't have a more humane, less commercialized way to approach burial.

The truth is, I need to experience my mother's presence in the world around me and not just in my head.

I am the indoctrinated child of two lapsed Irish Catholics. Which is to say: I am not religious.

My whole life, I had been taught to read and study, to seek understanding in knowledge of history, of cultures.

Our minds are mysterious; our conscious brain is like a ship on a sea that is obscure to us.

And after my mother's death I became more open to and empathetic about other people's struggles and losses.

I live to collect information, and I am also a perfectionist.

What's endlessly complicated in thinking about women's gymnastics is the way that vulnerability and power are threaded through the sport.

'Hamlet' is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it.

A mother is beyond any notion of a beginning. That's what makes her a mother.