Meghan O'Rourke

“Like my mother before me, I have always been a good speller.”

“Sometimes you don't even know what you want until you find out you can't have it.”

“I'm not much like my mother; that role falls to my brothers, who have more of her blithe and freewheeling spirit.”

“When my mother was sick, I found myself needing to put down in my journals all sorts of things - to try to understand them, and, I think, to try to remember them.”

“What's endlessly complicated in thinking about women's gymnastics is the way that vulnerability and power are threaded through the sport.”

“One of the grubby truths about a loss is that you don't just mourn the dead person, you mourn the person you got to be when the lost one was alive. This loss might even be what affects you the most.”

“My whole life, I had been taught to read and study, to seek understanding in knowledge of history, of cultures.”

“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.”

“'Hamlet' is a play about a man whose grief is deemed unseemly.”

“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.”

“Loss doesn't feel redeemable. But for me one consoling aspect is the recognition that, in this at least, none of us is different from anyone else: We all lose loved ones; we all face our own death.”

“And after my mother's death I became more open to and empathetic about other people's struggles and losses.”

“the loss is transformative, in good ways and bad, a tangle of change that cannot be threaded into the usual narrative spools...It's not an emergence from the cocoon, but a tree growing around an obstruction.”

“A mother is beyond any notion of a beginning. That's what makes her a mother.”

“Writing has always been the primary way I make sense of the world.”

“I believe in the importance of individuality, but in the midst of grief I also find myself wanting connection - wanting to be reminded that the sadness I feel is not just mine but ours.”

“I envy my Jewish friends the ritual of saying kaddish - a ritual that seems perfectly conceived, with its built-in support group and its ceremonious designation of time each day devoted to remembering the lost person.”

“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 them.”

“My mother died of metastatic colorectal cancer shortly before three P.M. on Christmas Day of 2008. I don't know the exact time of her death, because none of us thought to look at a clock for a while after she stopped breathing.”

“This is part of the complexity of grief: A piece of you recognizes it is an extreme state, an altered state, yet a large part of you is entirely subject to its demands.”