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" 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. "

Meghan O'Rourke

End

Say

People

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

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Mother

" 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. "

" 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. "

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Much

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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Ship

Minds

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" There is always tension in women's gymnastics between athleticism, grace, performance, and eros. "

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

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

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

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

" Grief is at once a public and a private experience. One's inner, inexpressible disruption cannot be fully realized in one's public persona. "

" 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. "

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

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

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Role

Spirit

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "