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. Meghan O'Rourke Read Quote
One word I had throughout the first year and a half of my mother’s death was ‘unmoored.’ I felt that I had no anchor, that I had no home in the world. Meghan O'Rourke Read Quote
I am the indoctrinated child of two lapsed Irish Catholics. Which is to say: I am not religious. Meghan O'Rourke Read Quote
Grief is a bad moon, a sleeper wave. It’s like having an inner combatant, a saboteur who, at the slightest change in the sunlight, or at the first notes of a jingle for a dog food commercial, will flick the memory switch, bringing tears to your eyes. Meghan O'Rourke Read Quote
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. Meghan O'Rourke Read Quote
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. Meghan O'Rourke Read Quote
All love stories are tales of beginnings. When we talk about falling in love, we go to the beginning, to pinpoint the moment of freefall. Meghan O'Rourke Read Quote
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. Meghan O'Rourke Read Quote
What’s endlessly complicated in thinking about women’s gymnastics is the way that vulnerability and power are threaded through the sport. Meghan O'Rourke Read Quote
