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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. "

Meghan O'Rourke

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

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

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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 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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" 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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" 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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" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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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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" 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. "

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

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" 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. "

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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 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. "

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

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

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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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" 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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