Meghan O'Rourke Quotes
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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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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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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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'Hamlet' is a play about a man whose grief is deemed unseemly.
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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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Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me.
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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.
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Sometimes you don't even know what you want until you find out you can't have it.
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If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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I think that grief is a profound spiritual, metaphysical, and - oddly - physical reckoning with death, which we don't understand well. It's both the process by which you relearn the world in the absence of someone who was a pillar in it, and the process in which you confront the reality of death.
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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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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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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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Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity was wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the loss.
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It's a blessing not to be alone in your grief but it's also painful to see your parents and siblings in pain.
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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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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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Like my mother before me, I have always been a good speller.
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Yet the story of Orpheus, it occurs to me, is not just about the desire of the living to resuscitate the dead but about the ways in which the dead drag us along into their shadowy realm because we cannot let them go. So we follow them into the Underworld, descending, descending, until one day we turn and make our way back.
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I was not raised with religion, and I had no faith before my mother died. On the other hand, when she died, I did not immediately feel she was "gone." I don't believe she is in something like heaven, but I also feel that we don't understand much about the nature of the universe. So I hold on to that uncertainty, at times.
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After all dying is one of the most profound and difficult experiences we have.
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The people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created.
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There is always tension in women's gymnastics between athleticism, grace, performance, and eros.
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Loss is so paradoxical: It is at once enormous and tiny.
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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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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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