Meghan O'Rourke quotes

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. (Meghan O'Rourke)
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.
Meghan O'Rourke
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.
Meghan O'Rourke
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.
Meghan O'Rourke
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.
Meghan O'Rourke
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.
Meghan O'Rourke
Sometimes you don't even know what you want until you find out you can't have it.
Meghan O'Rourke
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.
Meghan O'Rourke
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.
Meghan O'Rourke
What's endlessly complicated in thinking about women's gymnastics is the way that vulnerability and power are threaded through the sport.
Meghan O'Rourke
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. (Meghan O'Rourke)
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.
Meghan O'Rourke
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.
Meghan O'Rourke
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.
Meghan O'Rourke
Loss is so paradoxical: It is at once enormous and tiny.
Meghan O'Rourke
And after my mother's death I became more open to and empathetic about other people's struggles and losses.
Meghan O'Rourke
I'm not much like my mother; that role falls to my brothers, who have more of her blithe and freewheeling spirit.
Meghan O'Rourke
Writing has always been the primary way I make sense of the world.
Meghan O'Rourke
There is always tension in women's gymnastics between athleticism, grace, performance, and eros.
Meghan O'Rourke
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.
Meghan O'Rourke
If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal. (Meghan O'Rourke)
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.
Meghan O'Rourke
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.
Meghan O'Rourke
The truth is, I need to experience my mother's presence in the world around me and not just in my head.
Meghan O'Rourke
Like my mother before me, I have always been a good speller.
Meghan O'Rourke