A mother is beyond any notion of a beginning. That's what makes her a mother. — Meghan O'Rourke Copy Share Image
But when my mother died, I found that I did not believe that she was gone. — Meghan O'Rourke Copy Share Image
Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me. — Meghan O'Rourke Copy Share Image
I'm not much like my mother; that role falls to my brothers, who have more of her blithe and freewheeling spirit. — Meghan O'Rourke Copy Share Image
I think about my mother every day. But usually the thoughts are fleeting - she crosses my mind like a spring cardinal… — Meghan O'Rourke Copy Share Image
And after my mother's death I became more open to and empathetic about other people's struggles and losses. — Meghan O'Rourke Copy Share Image
A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a life.… — Meghan O'Rourke Copy Share Image
When my mother was sick, I found myself needing to put down in my journals all sorts of things - to try… — Meghan O'Rourke Copy Share Image
My mother died of metastatic colorectal cancer shortly before three P.M. on Christmas Day of 2008. I don't know the exact time… — Meghan O'Rourke Copy Share Image
“Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me. A mother, after… — Meghan O'Rourke Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
One word I had throughout the first year and a half of my mother's death was 'unmoored.' I felt that I had… — Meghan O'Rourke Copy Share Image
My mother never liked Mother's Day. She thought it was a fake holiday dreamed up by Hallmark to commodify deep sentiments that… — Meghan O'Rourke Copy Share Image
I was not raised with religion, and I had no faith before my mother died. On the other hand, when she died,… — 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
