Meghan O'Rourke
Meghan O'Rourke
Meghan O'Rourkeis an American nonfiction writer, poet and critic...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
CountryUnited States of America
sports gymnastics thinking
What's endlessly complicated in thinking about women's gymnastics is the way that vulnerability and power are threaded through the sport.
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.
gymnastics grace athleticism
There is always tension in women's gymnastics between athleticism, grace, performance, and eros.
mother world needs
The truth is, I need to experience my mother's presence in the world around me and not just in my head.
sea brain mind
Our minds are mysterious; our conscious brain is like a ship on a sea that is obscure to us.
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.
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.
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.
mother stories
A mother is a story with no beginning. That is what defines her.
thinking people cynical
For sure, the funeral industry seems intensely cynical to me and I don't think it is HELPING people mourn.
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 description describing
'Hamlet' is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it.
envy support each-day
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.
mother sky wake-up
A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without sky: unimaginable.