Meghan O'Rourke
Meghan O'Rourke
Meghan O'Rourkeis an American nonfiction writer, poet and critic...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
CountryUnited States of America
grief thinking risk
One of the difficulties with grief research is that it risks making certain kinds of grief seem normal and others abnormal - and of course having a sense of the contours of grief is, I think, truly useful, one has to remember it's not a science, it's an individual reckoning, which science is just trying to help us describe.
dream grief writing
While I did a lot of research, I ended up feeling that the best way to write about grief was to describe it from the inside out - the show the strange intensities that come along with it, the peculiar thoughts, the longing for that past - all the strange moments of thinking you glimpse the dead person on the street, or in your dreams.
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.
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.
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.
drama grief loss
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.
grief description describing
'Hamlet' is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing 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.
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.
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.
grief transactions conditions
If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.