Meghan O'Rourke
Meghan O'Rourke
Meghan O'Rourkeis an American nonfiction writer, poet and critic...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
CountryUnited States of America
thinking people cynical
For sure, the funeral industry seems intensely cynical to me and I don't think it is HELPING people mourn.
relationship letting-go loss
Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity was wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the loss.
grief description describing
'Hamlet' is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it.
envy support each-day
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.
mother sky wake-up
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.
self talent conscious
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.
want sometimes what-you-want
Sometimes you don't even know what you want until you find out you can't have it.
grief disruption persona
Grief is at once a public and a private experience. One's inner, inexpressible disruption cannot be fully realized in one's public persona.
grief sadness flu
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.
fate thinking ideas
We have an idea - a very modern idea - that dying is undignified. But I think this is because we have the illusion that we can control our bodies and our fates.
grief people feelings
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.
grief believe sadness
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.
holy disappear command
Time doesn’t obey our commands. You cannot make it holy just because it is disappearing.
spiritual grief reality
I think that grief is a profound spiritual, metaphysical, and - oddly - physical reckoning with death, which we don't understand well. It's both the process by which you relearn the world in the absence of someone who was a pillar in it, and the process in which you confront the reality of death.