Quotes from Meghan O'Rourke

Many grievers experience intense yearning or longing after a death - more than they experience, say, denial.

I was stunned by the way my mother's body was being taken to pieces, how each new week brought a new failure, how surreal the disintegration of a body was.

The more I talked to sick people. the more I found that what is most disturbing for many of is is that grace has become a kind of moral requirement in sickness: If you must be ill, at least be improved by your illness. And yet conditions under which grace can emerge may not be present.

This is where we die, I thought, stripped of any fleck of the festive. Dying is bureaucratic and fluorescent.

The actual encounter was always confusing, eleven minutes of liminal contact in which I tried to conduct myself in a way that would make the doctor like me, in the hope they would take some true interest in my plight. But their day was full of tests to order, bureaucracy to cut through, an education that taught them not to say, "I don't know what's wrong with you." And so we stood together in a tiny antiseptic room, the doctor and patient, a world apart.

Americans' embrace of the "natural approach" is a rebuke to the dominant social structures of our time—Big Pharma, Big Medicine, Big Tech. But in a crucial way it is also in thrall to one of the most powerful contemporary Western delusions: namely, the idea that we can control the outcomes of our lives, in this case through self-purification.

But now it seemed to me that Hamlet was moody and irascible in no small part because he is grieving: his father has just died. He is radically dislocated, stumbling through the days while the rest of the world acts as if nothing important has changed.

On my message boards a recurrent theme was having a partner who didn't help, who didn't get it, who even judged and blamed. Even partners who did help often couldn't feel the wave of need engulfing the ill person. And my god, the need. It felt shameful to need other people so much.

After all, a terrible anxiety attends chronic illness. Over time, it becomes difficult to untangle the suffering from symptoms like pain from the suffering inflicted by the anxiety over the possibility of more pain, and worse outcomes, in the future. This does not mean that the illness is in the mind; rather, the mind—that machine for making meaning—makes endless meanings of its new state, which may themselves influence the experience.

be sick in this way is to have the unpleasant feeling that you are impersonating yourself. When you're sick, the act of living is more act than living. Healthy people have the luxury of forgetting that their existence depends on a cascade of precise cellular interactions. Not you.

Time doesn't obey our commands. You cannot make it holy just because it is disappearing.

How to describe intermittent severe pain on the same scale as constant middle-range pain, which I found more debilitating?

I got used to being uncomfortable, and I internalized the idea that my mentioning my discomfort made me fussy—"The princess and the pea," my mother once said, in irritation, making it clear that I was demanding too much when I complained.

what happens to patients who don't have the energy or the means to persevere in connecting their disconnected doctors, he said, "They fall through the cracks, and they suffer in their own world, alone.

the hospital, I always felt like Alice at the Mad Hatter's tea party: I had woken up in a world that seemed utterly logical to its inhabitants but quite mad to me.

To have a poorly understood disease is to be brought up against every flaw in the U.S. health care system; to collide with the structural problems of a late-capitalist society that values productivity more than health; and to confront the philosophical problem of conveying an experience that lacks an accepted framework.

It is unbearable—and yet I bear it.

To become chronically ill is not only to have a disease that you have to manage, but to have a new story about yourself, a story that many people refuse to hear—because it is deeply unsatisfying, full of fits and starts, anger, resentment, chasms of unruly need. My own illness story has no destination.

Onlookers often respond to the experience of chronically ill people by focusing on the supposed positives, presumably because it makes the pain of witness bearable.

When I got acutely sick, I could only dream of such a scenario! Instead, I laboriously made my many appointments, trundling from doctor to doctor, trying to get them to share information and offer treatments.

I think: it's the holidays. There are parties. I'm young. I've spent the past two years going to oncologists. I'm going to put on my party shoes. And I do go to one party, and I leave when people start to dance around a pole. Later I start dating the man whose party it was, and he remembers being glad I came, and casually tells me how he flirted his head off that night. I'm not in your country, I think. I haven't lived in your country for a while.

To be chronically ill is to be in a state of ever-present "camouflaged grieving," as the historian Jennifer Stitt puts it. It was this ever-present grief I felt was being swept under the rug when my friend counseled me to see the good that had come of my illness. She wasn't wrong that something had come of it—but her quick counsel negated the complexity of the quest.

don't believe I will get better," Daudet wrote, ". . . yet I always behave as if my damned pains were going to disappear by tomorrow morning.")

the body is a site of social encounter, not a vessel for American hyperindividualism.