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" 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

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

Meghan O'Rourke

Ship

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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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

Meghan O'Rourke

Mother

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

" One of the ideas I've clung to most of my life is that if I just try hard enough it will work out. "

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