Meghan O'Rourke

Meghan O'Rourke
Meghan O'Rourkeis an American nonfiction writer, poet and critic...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
CountryUnited States of America
mother loss knowing
Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me.
loss tiny enormous
Loss is so paradoxical: It is at once enormous and tiny.
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 struggle loss
And after my mother's death I became more open to and empathetic about other people's struggles and losses.
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.
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.
struggle loss doe
Faith does help mourners survive their loss, some studies suggest; but I imagine one still struggles.
loss thinking way
Be patient with yourself. Don't make the loss harder by thinking you should be a certain way, or have bounced back, etc.
loss past self
There are many kinds of loss embedded in a loss - the loss of the person, and the loss of the self you got to be with that person. And the seeming loss of the past, which now feels forever out of reach.
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.
loss lost-ones alive
One of the grubby truths about a loss is that you don't just mourn the dead person, you mourn the person you got to be when the lost one was alive. This loss might even be what affects you the most.
cancer christmas clock death died exact mother none stopped three time
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.
denial longing intense
Many grievers experience intense yearning or longing after a death - more than they experience, say, denial.
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.