115 Quotes by Meghan O'Rourke

In the months that followed my mother’s death, I managed to look like a normal person. I walked the street; I answered my phone; I brushed my teeth; most of the time. But I was not OK. I was in grief. Nothing seemed important. Daily tasks were exhausting. Dishes piled in the sink, knives crusted with strawberry jam. At one point I did not wash my hair for ten days. I felt that I had abruptly arrived at a terrible, insistent truth about the impermanence of everyday.

One of the ideas I’ve clung to most of my life is that if I just try hard enough it will work out.

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.

I’m not much like my mother; that role falls to my brothers, who have more of her blithe and freewheeling spirit.

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.

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.

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.

Many Americans don’t mourn in public anymore – we don’t wear black, we don’t beat our chests and wail.

I was stunned by the way my mother’s body was being taken to pieces, how each new week brought a new failure, how surreal the disintegration of a body was.