Meghan O'Rourke (born 1976 in Brooklyn, New York) is an American nonfiction writer, poet and critic.
Grief is at once a public and a private experience. One's inner, inexpressible disruption cannot be fully realized in one's public persona.
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.
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.
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.
Like my mother before me, I have always been a good speller.
'Hamlet' is a play about a man whose grief is deemed unseemly.
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.
After all dying is one of the most profound and difficult experiences we have.
I am the indoctrinated child of two lapsed Irish Catholics. Which is to say: I am not religious.
For sure, the funeral industry seems intensely cynical to me and I don't think it is HELPING people mourn.
Much of Hamlet is about the precise kind of slippage the mourner experiences: the difference between being and seeming, the uncertainty about how the inner translates into the outer, the sense that one is expected to perform grief palatably. (If you don’t seem sad, people worry; but if you are grief-stricken, people flinch away from your pain. )
A mother is a story with no beginning. That is what defines her.
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.
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.
A mother is beyond any notion of a beginning. That's what makes her a mother.
I'm not much like my mother; that role falls to my brothers, who have more of her blithe and freewheeling spirit.
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.
While I did a lot of research, I ended up feeling that the best way to write about grief was to describe it from the inside out - the show the strange intensities that come along with it, the peculiar thoughts, the longing for that past - all the strange moments of thinking you glimpse the dead person on the street, or in your dreams.
What's endlessly complicated in thinking about women's gymnastics is the way that vulnerability and power are threaded through the sport.
Loss is so paradoxical: It is at once enormous and tiny.