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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. "

Meghan O'Rourke

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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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" 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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" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meghan O'Rourke

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

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

Meghan O'Rourke

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

Meghan O'Rourke

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

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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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