'Hamlet' is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it. — Meghan O'Rourke Death Copy Share Image
Sometimes you don't even know what you want until you find out you can't have it. — Meghan O'Rourke Sometimes 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 Disruption Copy Share Image
There are many kinds of loss embedded in a loss - the loss of the person, and the loss of the self… — Meghan O'Rourke Death Copy Share Image
One of the difficulties with grief research is that it risks making certain kinds of grief seem normal and others abnormal -… — Meghan O'Rourke Abnormal 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… — Meghan O'Rourke Altered 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… — Meghan O'Rourke Love 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… — Meghan O'Rourke Conscious 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… — Meghan O'Rourke Death 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… — Meghan O'Rourke Death 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 Cynical 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… — Meghan O'Rourke Bruised 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 Entry Copy Share Image
But when my mother died, I found that I did not believe that she was gone. — Meghan O'Rourke Believe Copy Share Image
Like my mother before me, I have always been a good speller. — Meghan O'Rourke Mother Copy Share Image
“One of the grubby truths about a loss is that you don't just mourn the dead person, you mourn the person you… — Meghan O'Rourke Alive Copy Share Image
I think that grief is a profound spiritual, metaphysical, and - oddly - physical reckoning with death, which we don't understand well.… — Meghan O'Rourke Absence Copy Share Image
I believe in the importance of individuality, but in the midst of grief I also find myself wanting connection - wanting to… — Meghan O'Rourke Believe 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 Death Copy Share Image
Many researchers say the dominant emotion experienced after loss is yearning or searching. And while you might feel more anger early on,… — Meghan O'Rourke Dominant Copy Share Image
I envy my Jewish friends the ritual of saying kaddish - a ritual that seems perfectly conceived, with its built-in support group… — Meghan O'Rourke Devoted 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 Cardinals Copy Share Image
One of the things about grief is that it can bring a deeper perspective into your life; in the end, it has,… — Meghan O'Rourke Death Copy Share Image
We have an idea - a very modern idea - that dying is undignified. But I think this is because we have… — Meghan O'Rourke Body Copy Share Image
