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" 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

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

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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. "

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

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" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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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. "

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

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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

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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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" 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. "

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

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

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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

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

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" 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. "

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

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

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

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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. "

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

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