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.
Category Archive: Meghan O’Rourke
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.
If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.
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 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.
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.
Our minds are mysterious; our conscious brain is like a ship on a sea that is obscure to us.
What’s endlessly complicated in thinking about women’s gymnastics is the way that vulnerability and power are threaded through the sport.
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.
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.