Meghan O'Rourke
Meghan O'Rourke
Meghan O'Rourkeis an American nonfiction writer, poet and critic...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
CountryUnited States of America
profound dying difficult-experiences
After all dying is one of the most profound and difficult experiences we have.
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.
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.
mother believe hands
I was not raised with religion, and I had no faith before my mother died. On the other hand, when she died, I did not immediately feel she was "gone." I don't believe she is in something like heaven, but I also feel that we don't understand much about the nature of the universe. So I hold on to that uncertainty, at times.
powerful book self
With ferocity and extraordinary craft, Lizzie Harris has made a book of poems that resonates far beyond the personal stories it tells. Stop Wanting reveals, in every lyric, its author's profound metaphorical gifts. In its ironies and intensities, it brings to mind a writer like the young Sylvia Plath, though what is startling about Harris' s work is the way it combines those gifts with a muted, deft self-awareness. Most of all, these are wonderfully shaped, powerful, and surprising poems-a startling debut.
understanding culture taught
My whole life, I had been taught to read and study, to seek understanding in knowledge of history, of cultures.
mother loss knowing
Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me.
stress funeral cost
Funerals cost so much money, and are likely to be an additional source of stress in this recession - it's sad that we don't have a more humane, less commercialized way to approach burial.
loss tiny enormous
Loss is so paradoxical: It is at once enormous and tiny.
mother
Like my mother before me, I have always been a good speller.
mother brother fall
I'm not much like my mother; that role falls to my brothers, who have more of her blithe and freewheeling spirit.
mother world portal
A mother is the portal by which you enter the world.