I am the indoctrinated child of two lapsed Irish Catholics. Which is to say: I am not religious. — 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, I did not immediately feel she was "gone." I don't believe she is in something like heaven, but… — 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
