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" A mother is beyond any notion of a beginning. That's what makes her a mother. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Her
Makes
Mother
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" It's all too easy when talking about female gymnasts to fall into the trap of infantilizing them, spending more time worrying more about female vulnerability than we do celebrating female strength. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
Meghan O'Rourke
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" One of the ideas I've clung to most of my life is that if I just try hard enough it will work out. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Try
My Life
Life
" 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. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Television
Never
Loss
" There is always tension in women's gymnastics between athleticism, grace, performance, and eros. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Women
Always
Eros
" 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. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Life
Mother
She
" The truth is, I need to experience my mother's presence in the world around me and not just in my head. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Experience
Truth Is
Truth
" I'm not much like my mother; that role falls to my brothers, who have more of her blithe and freewheeling spirit. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Like
Role
Spirit
" Like my mother before me, I have always been a good speller. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Mother
Me
Like
" But when my mother died, I found that I did not believe that she was gone. "
Meghan O'Rourke
She
Believe
Did
" 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. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Women
Self-Conscious
Talents
" 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. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Time
Say
Long
" Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Die
Loss
She
" 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. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Change
Dog
Memory
" 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. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Day
Mother
Know
" Many Americans don't mourn in public anymore - we don't wear black, we don't beat our chests and wail. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Beat
Wear
Black
" What's endlessly complicated in thinking about women's gymnastics is the way that vulnerability and power are threaded through the sport. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Thinking
Way
Women
" 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. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Home
Mother
World
" 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. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Wonder
Face
Feel
" 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. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Loss
Recognition
Me
" I am the indoctrinated child of two lapsed Irish Catholics. Which is to say: I am not religious. "
Meghan O'Rourke
I Am
Child
Religious
" And after my mother's death I became more open to and empathetic about other people's struggles and losses. "
Meghan O'Rourke
People
Struggles
Death
" 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. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Sick
Remember
Think
" I live to collect information, and I am also a perfectionist. "
Meghan O'Rourke
I Am
Information
Live
" 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. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Deep
Holiday
She
" My whole life, I had been taught to read and study, to seek understanding in knowledge of history, of cultures. "
Meghan O'Rourke
History
Understanding
Life
" 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
Much
Like
More
" 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
Experience
Disruption
Grief