Words matter. These are the best Meghan O’Rourke Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Our minds are mysterious; our conscious brain is like a ship on a sea that is obscure to us.
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.
A mother is beyond any notion of a beginning. That’s what makes her a mother.
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.
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.
But when my mother died, I found that I did not believe that she was gone.
Writing has always been the primary way I make sense of the world.
‘Hamlet’ is the best description of grief I’ve read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it.
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.
A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without sky: unimaginable.
‘Hamlet’ is a play about a man whose grief is deemed unseemly.
I’m not much like my mother; that role falls to my brothers, who have more of her blithe and freewheeling spirit.
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.
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.
And after my mother’s death I became more open to and empathetic about other people’s struggles and losses.
If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.
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.
I envy my Jewish friends the ritual of saying kaddish – a ritual that seems perfectly conceived, with its built-in support group and its ceremonious designation of time each day devoted to remembering the lost person.
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 at once a public and a private experience. One’s inner, inexpressible disruption cannot be fully realized in one’s public persona.
Loss is so paradoxical: It is at once enormous and tiny.
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.
My whole life, I had been taught to read and study, to seek understanding in knowledge of history, of cultures.
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.
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.
I am the indoctrinated child of two lapsed Irish Catholics. Which is to say: I am not religious.
Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me.
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.
I live to collect information, and I am also a perfectionist.
