Quotes from Meghan O'Rourke

Grief is paradoxical: you know you must let go, and yet letting go cannot happen all at once. The literature of mourning enacts that dilemma; its solace lies in the ritual of remembering the dead and then saying, There is no solace, and also, This has been going on a long time.

The tendency in many parts of medicine is, if we can't measure it, it doesn't exist, or the patient is cuckoo.

Only a few friends realized at the time how much physical suffering I was undergoing. We are bad at recognizing the suffering of others unless we are given clear-cut clues and evidence. And so invisible illnesses often go unacknowledged, while less serious conditions get attention.

So much of dealing with a disease is waiting. Waiting for appointments, for tests, for procedures. And waiting, more broadly, for it --for the thing itself, for the other shoe to drop. Except in the waiting you keep forgetting that it will really happen--it's more like a threat, an anxiety: Will my love love me forever?

Suddenly it was fall, the season of death, the anniversary of things-going-to-hell.

the loss is transformative, in good ways and bad, a tangle of change that cannot be threaded into the usual narrative spools...It's not an emergence from the cocoon, but a tree growing around an obstruction.

Ethical loneliness is what happens when wrongs are compounded by going cruelly unacknowledged.

To have pain is to have certainty; to hear about pain is to have doubt." The same was true of all my symptoms, none of which could be seen. In those months I was lonely in a way I never had been before. I could taste the solitude of the human body like brine in my mouth, a taste that never left me. •

Autoimmunity is internalized by patients as an opportunity for the ultimate self-management project. But in fact it is a manifestation of a flawed collective project. If it is an indictment of anything, it is an indictment not of our personhood but of our impulse to see social problems as being about our personhood, instead of a consequence of our collective shortcomings as co-citizens of this place and time.

Knowledge brings the hope of treatment or cure. And even if there is no cure, a diagnosis is a form of knowing (the word "diagnosis" derives from the Greek gign?skein, "to know") that allows others to recognize our experience and enables us to tell its story

When we are learning the world, we know things we cannot say how we know. When we are relearning the world in the aftermath of a loss, we feel things we had almost forgotten, old things, beneath the seat of reason.

The emotional journey has been as hard as the physical one. The fear I feel, in combination with busy doctors who don't have time to listen, has really affected me.

The truth is, I need to experience my mother's presence in the world around me and not just in my head.

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

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

What's endlessly complicated in thinking about women's gymnastics is the way that vulnerability and power are threaded through the sport.

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.

Television has never known what to do with grief, which resists narrative: the dramas of grief are largely internal - for the bereaved, it is a chaotic, intense, episodic period, but the chaos is by and large subterranean, and easily appears static to the friendly onlooker who has absorbed the fact of loss and moved on.

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

I wasn't prepared for the fact that grief is so unpredictable. It wasn't just sadness, and it wasn't linear. Somehow I'd thought that the first days would be the worst and then it would get steadily better - like getting over the flu. That's not how it was.

My mother died of metastatic colorectal cancer shortly before three P.M. on Christmas Day of 2008. I don't know the exact time of her death, because none of us thought to look at a clock for a while after she stopped breathing.

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

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 is at once a public and a private experience. One's inner, inexpressible disruption cannot be fully realized in one's public persona.