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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. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Thinking
Way
Women
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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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Experience
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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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Piece
Grief
You
" 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. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Change
Dog
Memory
" Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Die
Loss
She
" 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
Like
Role
Spirit
" 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. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Moment
Falling In Love
Love
" Writing has always been the primary way I make sense of the world. "
Meghan O'Rourke
World
Always
Been
" 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
Like
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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
Life
Mother
She
" Many Americans don't mourn in public anymore - we don't wear black, we don't beat our chests and wail. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Beat
Wear
Black
" My whole life, I had been taught to read and study, to seek understanding in knowledge of history, of cultures. "
Meghan O'Rourke
History
Understanding
Life
" Our minds are mysterious; our conscious brain is like a ship on a sea that is obscure to us. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Us
Ship
Minds
" 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. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Time
Say
Long
" Like my mother before me, I have always been a good speller. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Mother
Me
Like
" A mother is beyond any notion of a beginning. That's what makes her a mother. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Her
Makes
Mother
" There is always tension in women's gymnastics between athleticism, grace, performance, and eros. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Women
Always
Eros
" And after my mother's death I became more open to and empathetic about other people's struggles and losses. "
Meghan O'Rourke
People
Struggles
Death
" 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. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Thoughts
Day
Mother
" 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. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Wonder
Face
Feel
" 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
Feel
Sadness
Myself
" 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. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Women
Self-Conscious
Talents
" 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. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Day
Mother
Know
" If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Universal
Exquisitely
Grief
" I am the indoctrinated child of two lapsed Irish Catholics. Which is to say: I am not religious. "
Meghan O'Rourke
I Am
Child
Religious
" 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. "
Meghan O'Rourke
End
Say
People
" 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. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Deep
Holiday
She
" Grief is at once a public and a private experience. One's inner, inexpressible disruption cannot be fully realized in one's public persona. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Experience
Disruption
Grief
" 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. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Sick
Remember
Think
" 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
Television
Never
Loss
" I live to collect information, and I am also a perfectionist. "
Meghan O'Rourke
I Am
Information
Live