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" Writing has always been the primary way I make sense of the world. "
Meghan O'Rourke
World
Always
Been
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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
History
Understanding
Life
" 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
" 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
" 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
Home
Mother
World
" 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
" 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. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Loss
Recognition
Me
" 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
" Like my mother before me, I have always been a good speller. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Mother
Me
Like
" 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
" A mother is beyond any notion of a beginning. That's what makes her a mother. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Her
Makes
Mother
" 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. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Strength
Fall
Easy
" The truth is, I need to experience my mother's presence in the world around me and not just in my head. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Experience
Truth Is
Truth
" 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. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Saying
Day
Support
" 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
" 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
" 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
Try
My Life
Life
" 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. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Piece
Grief
You
" If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Universal
Exquisitely
Grief
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" There is always tension in women's gymnastics between athleticism, grace, performance, and eros. "
Meghan O'Rourke
Women
Always
Eros
" But when my mother died, I found that I did not believe that she was gone. "
Meghan O'Rourke
She
Believe
Did