Meghan O'Rourke Quotes

Grief is a normal and natural response to loss. It is originally an unlearned feeling process. Keeping grief inside increases your pain.

Grief is a very complicated monster. There's no real exorcising of it. It has a different form every day.

To grieve is something extremely difficult, we don't even know how to begin to grieve, and I don't know how you can be taught to grieve.

If you lose a parent, no matter at what age, every five or 10 years you have a different way of missing them and a different way of getting on with your life.

A fundamental and unfortunate part of being alive is to suffer loss and to suffer grief.

Grief - the actual, natural process of it - doesn't have a schedule that I can work my life around.

Grief, a type of sadness that most often occurs when you have lost someone you love, is a sneaky thing, because it can disappear for a long time, and then pop back up when you least expect it.

While I did a lot of research, I ended up feeling that the best way to write about grief was to describe it from the inside out - the show the strange intensities that come along with it, the peculiar thoughts, the longing for that past - all the strange moments of thinking you glimpse the dead person on the street, or in your dreams.

When you lose a person you love so much, surviving the loss is difficult.

It's a very difficult thing losing a parent, but I think there's an added complication for me, because he was so well-loved and he had this very open charm that made people feel they had a personal relationship with him.

I was struck after 9/11 by what seemed the assumption that everyone bereaved by that event was suffering the same thing. I wanted to explore how individual grief is, how complicated, how colored by the complexity of the mourner's relationship with the person who's died.

Where grief is fresh, any attempt to divert it only irritates.

Grief is the agony of an instant; the indulgence of grief the blunder of a life.

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.

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.

When Michael died I was tipped over the edge. I was beyond grief.

But there, everything has its drawbacks, as the man said when his mother-in-law died, and they came down upon him for the funeral expenses.

The flip side of suicide is that it leaves a lingering question in the minds of the people who survived. It's like a cancer that's metastasized. The suicide is the cancer and the metastasis is all these people saying, Why? Why? Why?

There is a kind of euphoria of grief, a degree of madness.

The loss of my father was the most traumatic event in my life - I can't forget the pain.

Our culture has become increasingly intolerant of that acute sorrow, that intense mental anguish and deep remorse which may be defined as grief. We want to medicate such sorrow away.

IN April 1882 my father died; and I was at once whirled out of my land of dreams into a very different sphere.

Grieve and mourn for yourself not once or twice, but again and again.

I am not sad, but I am melancholic. When you lose your mother at 20 and then your father soon after, melancholia is part of your life.

In truth, 2007 was the hardest year of my life. I lost my best friend. I lost my father.