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

Meghan O'Rourke

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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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" 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 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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" 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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" 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. "

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

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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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" 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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" 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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" 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. "

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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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" 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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