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 Copy Share Image
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… — Meghan O'Rourke Copy Share Image
'Hamlet' is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it. — Meghan O'Rourke Copy Share Image
Sometimes you don't even know what you want until you find out you can't have it. — Meghan O'Rourke Copy Share Image
Grief is at once a public and a private experience. One's inner, inexpressible disruption cannot be fully realized in one's public persona. — Meghan O'Rourke Copy Share Image
There are many kinds of loss embedded in a loss - the loss of the person, and the loss of the self you got… — Meghan O'Rourke Copy Share Image
One of the difficulties with grief research is that it risks making certain kinds of grief seem normal and others abnormal - and of… — Meghan O'Rourke Copy Share Image
This is part of the complexity of grief: A piece of you recognizes it is an extreme state, an altered state, yet a large… — Meghan O'Rourke Copy Share Image
The people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created. — Meghan O'Rourke Copy Share Image
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… — Meghan O'Rourke Copy Share Image
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. — Meghan O'Rourke Copy Share Image
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… — Meghan O'Rourke Copy Share Image
For sure, the funeral industry seems intensely cynical to me and I don't think it is HELPING people mourn. — Meghan O'Rourke Copy Share Image
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… — Meghan O'Rourke Copy Share Image
