Quotes from Meghan O'Rourke

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

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.

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

One word I had throughout the first year and a half of my mother's death was 'unmoored.' I felt that I had no anchor, that I had no home in the world.

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.

A mother is the portal by which you enter the world.

A mother is a story with no beginning. That is what defines her.

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

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

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.

And after my mother's death I became more open to and empathetic about other people's struggles and losses.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

But when my mother died, I found that I did not believe that she was gone.

Funerals cost so much money, and are likely to be an additional source of stress in this recession - it's sad that we don't have a more humane, less commercialized way to approach burial.

Writing has always been the primary way I make sense of the world.

One of the things about grief is that it can bring a deeper perspective into your life; in the end, it has, for me, though it's also brought sorrow.

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.

My whole life, I had been taught to read and study, to seek understanding in knowledge of history, of cultures.

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

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.