Meghan O'Rourke
Meghan O'Rourke
Meghan O'Rourkeis an American nonfiction writer, poet and critic...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
CountryUnited States of America
Meghan O'Rourke quotes about
religious children two
I am the indoctrinated child of two lapsed Irish Catholics. Which is to say: I am not religious.
information perfectionist
I live to collect information, and I am also a perfectionist.
loss tiny enormous
Loss is so paradoxical: It is at once enormous and tiny.
black beats mourn
Many Americans don't mourn in public anymore - we don't wear black, we don't beat our chests and wail.
understanding culture taught
My whole life, I had been taught to read and study, to seek understanding in knowledge of history, of cultures.
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.
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 pieces demand
This is part of the complexity of grief: A piece of you recognizes it is an extreme state, an altered state, yet a large part of you is entirely subject to its demands.
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.
one-day belief persons
What had happened still seemed implausible. A person was present your entire life, and then one day she disappeared and never came back. It resisted belief.
desire one-day stories
Yet the story of Orpheus, it occurs to me, is not just about the desire of the living to resuscitate the dead but about the ways in which the dead drag us along into their shadowy realm because we cannot let them go. So we follow them into the Underworld, descending, descending, until one day we turn and make our way back.
want sometimes what-you-want
Sometimes you don't even know what you want until you find out you can't have it.
denial longing intense
Many grievers experience intense yearning or longing after a death - more than they experience, say, denial.