Meghan ORourke Quotes - Page 3

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Time doesn’t obey our commands. You cannot make it holy just because it is disappearing.

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.

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.

After all dying is one of the most profound and difficult experiences we have.

For sure, the funeral industry seems intensely cynical to me and I don't think it is HELPING people mourn.

Be patient with yourself. Don't make the loss harder by thinking you should be a certain way, or have bounced back, etc.

Faith does help mourners survive their loss, some studies suggest; but I imagine one still struggles.

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 I also feel that we don't understand much about the nature of the universe. So I hold on to that uncertainty, at times.

Many researchers say the dominant emotion experienced after loss is yearning or searching. And while you might feel more anger early on, it's accompanied by a whole host of other feelings.

I have seen that grief can be very different for different people. While the range of emotions experienced is similar, the way we deal with those emotions isn't, necessarily.

While I did a lot of research, I ended up feeling that the best way to write about grief was to describe it from the inside out - the show the strange intensities that come along with it, the peculiar thoughts, the longing for that past - all the strange moments of thinking you glimpse the dead person on the street, or in your dreams.

One of the difficulties with grief research is that it risks making certain kinds of grief seem normal and others abnormal - and of course having a sense of the contours of grief is, I think, truly useful, one has to remember it's not a science, it's an individual reckoning, which science is just trying to help us describe.

There is no single way of grieving. But research suggests that there are some broad similarities among grievers.

Many grievers experience intense yearning or longing after a death - more than they experience, say, denial.