MEGHAN O'ROURKE

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.

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

To mourn is to wonder at the strangeness that grief is not written all over your face in bruised hieroglyphics. And it's also to feel, quite powerfully, that you're not allowed to descend into the deepest fathom of your grief - that to do so would be taboo somehow.

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.

Our minds are mysterious; our conscious brain is like a ship on a sea that is obscure to us.

But there is a discomfort that surrounds grief. It makes even the most well-intentioned people unsure of what to say. And so many of the freshly bereaved end up feeling even more alone.

Grief is characterized much more by waves of feeling that lessen and reoccur, it's less like stages and more like different states of feeling.

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.

'Hamlet' is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it.

Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me.

If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.

A mother is beyond any notion of a beginning. That's what makes her a mother.

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

When my mother was sick, I found myself needing to put down in my journals all sorts of things - to try to understand them, and, I think, to try to remember them.

I think about my mother every day. But usually the thoughts are fleeting - she crosses my mind like a spring cardinal that flies past the edge of your eye: startling, luminous, lovely... gone.

Like my mother before me, I have always been a good speller.

My theory is this: Women falter when they're called on to be highly self-conscious about their talents. Not when they're called on to enact them.

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.

I am the indoctrinated child of two lapsed Irish Catholics. Which is to say: I am not religious.

A death from a long illness is very different from a sudden death. It gives you time to say goodbye and time to adjust to the idea that the beloved will not be with you anymore.

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

'Hamlet' is a play about a man whose grief is deemed unseemly.

I live to collect information, and I am also a perfectionist.

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.

There is always tension in women's gymnastics between athleticism, grace, performance, and eros.