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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. "

Meghan O'Rourke

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

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

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

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

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

Meghan O'Rourke

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

Meghan O'Rourke

" 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. "

Meghan O'Rourke

" 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 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. "

Meghan O'Rourke

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

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

Meghan O'Rourke

" 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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" 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. "

Meghan O'Rourke

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

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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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