Meghan O'Rourke

“But there is a discomfort that surrounds grief. It makes even the most well-intentioned people unsure of what to say. And so many of the freshly bereaved end up feeling even more alone.”

“A death from a long illness is very different from a sudden death. It gives you time to say goodbye and time to adjust to the idea that the beloved will not be with you anymore.”

“If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.”

“Many Americans don't mourn in public anymore - we don't wear black, we don't beat our chests and wail.”

“Our minds are mysterious; our conscious brain is like a ship on a sea that is obscure to us.”

“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.”

“One word I had throughout the first year and a half of my mother's death was 'unmoored.' I felt that I had no anchor, that I had no home in the world.”

“I am the indoctrinated child of two lapsed Irish Catholics. Which is to say: I am not religious.”

“The truth is, I need to experience my mother's presence in the world around me and not just in my head.”

“I live to collect information, and I am also a perfectionist.”

“But when my mother died, I found that I did not believe that she was gone.”

“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.”

“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 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 first days would be the worst and then it would get steadily better - like getting over the flu. That's not how it was.”

“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.”

“What had happened still seemed implausible. A person was present your entire life, and then one day she disappeared and never came back. It resisted belief.”

“Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me.”

“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.”

“Loss is so paradoxical: It is at once enormous and tiny.”

“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 feel, quite powerfully, that you're not allowed to descend into the deepest fathom of your grief - that to do so would be taboo somehow.”