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.

Meghan O'Rourke

Categorized in : Reality Spiritual Grief

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

flu sadness grief

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.

Meghan O'Rourke

eye mother spring

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

mother home years

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

Meghan O'Rourke

portal mother world

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.

Meghan O'Rourke

grief dog memories

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

falling-in-love love-story stories

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.

Meghan O'Rourke

one-day stories desire

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

Meghan O'Rourke

mother stories

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

Meghan O'Rourke

perfectionist information

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

Meghan O'Rourke

sea mind brain

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.

Meghan O'Rourke

funeral cost stress

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

mother world needs

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.

Meghan O'Rourke

worry talking fall

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

Meghan O'Rourke

religious two children

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

Meghan O'Rourke

loss way thinking

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

Meghan O'Rourke

writing way world

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

gymnastics sports thinking

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

sick mother thinking

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

Meghan O'Rourke

struggle doe loss

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

goodbye giving ideas