Meghan O’Rourke Quotes.
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.
My whole life, I had been taught to read and study, to seek understanding in knowledge of history, of cultures.
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.
Writing has always been the primary way I make sense of the world.
If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.
A mother is a story with no beginning. That is what defines her.
A mother is the portal by which you enter the world.
There are many kinds of loss embedded in a loss – the loss of the person, and the loss of the self you got to be with that person. And the seeming loss of the past, which now feels forever out of reach.
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.
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.
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.
It’s a blessing not to be alone in your grief but it’s also painful to see your parents and siblings in pain.
I am the indoctrinated child of two lapsed Irish Catholics. Which is to say: I am not religious.
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.
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.
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.
There is always tension in women’s gymnastics between athleticism, grace, performance, and eros.
The truth is, I need to experience my mother’s presence in the world around me and not just in my head.
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.
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.
