Meghan O'Rourke
Meghan O'Rourke
Meghan O'Rourkeis an American nonfiction writer, poet and critic...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
CountryUnited States of America
information perfectionist
I live to collect information, and I am also a perfectionist.
religious children two
I am the indoctrinated child of two lapsed Irish Catholics. Which is to say: I am not religious.
black beats mourn
Many Americans don't mourn in public anymore - we don't wear black, we don't beat our chests and wail.
loss feelings might
Many researchers say the dominant emotion experienced after loss is yearning or searching. And while you might feel more anger early on, it's accompanied by a whole host of other feelings.
mother cancer breathing
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.
mother struggle loss
And after my mother's death I became more open to and empathetic about other people's struggles and losses.
grief over-you would-be
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.
mother notion
A mother is beyond any notion of a beginning. That's what makes her a mother.
pain grief differences
Much of Hamlet is about the precise kind of slippage the mourner experiences: the difference between being and seeming, the uncertainty about how the inner translates into the outer, the sense that one is expected to perform grief palatably. (If you don’t seem sad, people worry; but if you are grief-stricken, people flinch away from your pain.)
grief men play
'Hamlet' is a play about a man whose grief is deemed unseemly.
loss faces different
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.
mother believe gone
But when my mother died, I found that I did not believe that she was gone.
grief people different
I have seen that grief can be very different for different people. While the range of emotions experienced is similar, the way we deal with those emotions isn't, necessarily.
fall talking worry
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.