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Nothing Prepared Me For The Loss Of My Mother. Even Knowing That She Would Die Did Not Prepare Me.

-Meghan O'Rourke

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Nothing Prepared Me For

Meghan O'Rourke

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Nothing Prepared Me For The Loss Of My Mother. Even Knowing That She Would Die Did Not Prepare Me.

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But When My Mother Died, I Found That I Did Not Believe That She Was Gone.

The Truth Is, I Need To Experience My Mother's Presence In The World Around Me And Not Just In My Head.

It's All Too Easy When Talking About Female Gymnasts To Fall Into The Trap Of Infantilizing Them, Spending More Time Worrying More About Female Vulnerability Than We Do Celebrating Female Strength.

Relationships Take Up Energy; Letting Go Of Them, Psychiatrists Theorize, Entails Mental Work. When You Lose Someone You Were Close To, You Have To Reassess Your Picture Of The World And Your Place In It. The More Your Identity Was Wrapped Up With The Deceased, The More Difficult The Loss.

One Of The Grubby Truths About A Loss Is That You Don't Just Mourn The Dead Person, You Mourn The Person You Got To Be When The Lost One Was Alive. This Loss Might Even Be What Affects You The Most.

Much Of Hamlet Is About The Precise Kind Of Slippage The Mourner Experiences: The Difference Between Being And Seeming, The Uncertainty About How The Inner Translates Into The Outer, The Sense That One Is Expected To Perform Grief Palatably. (if You Don’t Seem Sad, People Worry; But If You Are Grief-stricken, People Flinch Away From Your Pain.)

Yet The Story Of Orpheus, It Occurs To Me, Is Not Just About The Desire Of The Living To Resuscitate The Dead But About The Ways In Which The Dead Drag Us Along Into Their Shadowy Realm Because We Cannot Let Them Go. So We Follow Them Into The Underworld, Descending, Descending, Until One Day We Turn And Make Our Way Back.

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.

Many Grievers Experience Intense Yearning Or Longing After A Death - More Than They Experience, Say, Denial.

Our Minds Are Mysterious; Our Conscious Brain Is Like A Ship On A Sea That Is Obscure To Us.

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.

Like My Mother Before Me, I Have Always Been A Good Speller.

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.

There Is No Single Way Of Grieving. But Research Suggests That There Are Some Broad Similarities Among Grievers.

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.

Many Americans Don't Mourn In Public Anymore - We Don't Wear Black, We Don't Beat Our Chests And Wail.

Nothing Prepared Me For The Loss Of My Mother. Even Knowing That She Would Die Did Not Prepare Me.

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.

Grief Is At Once A Public And A Private Experience. One's Inner, Inexpressible Disruption Cannot Be Fully Realized In One's Public Persona.

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.

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.

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.

After All Dying Is One Of The Most Profound And Difficult Experiences We Have.

Difficult Experiences

If The Condition Of Grief Is Nearly Universal, Its Transactions Are Exquisitely Personal.

Time Doesn’t Obey Our Commands. You Cannot Make It Holy Just Because It Is Disappearing.

For Sure, The Funeral Industry Seems Intensely Cynical To Me And I Don't Think It Is Helping People Mourn.

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.

Loss Is So Paradoxical: It Is At Once Enormous And Tiny.

And After My Mother's Death I Became More Open To And Empathetic About Other People's Struggles And Losses.

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.

With Ferocity And Extraordinary Craft, Lizzie Harris Has Made A Book Of Poems That Resonates Far Beyond The Personal Stories It Tells. Stop Wanting Reveals, In Every Lyric, Its Author's Profound Metaphorical Gifts. In Its Ironies And Intensities, It Brings To Mind A Writer Like The Young Sylvia Plath, Though What Is Startling About Harris' S Work Is The Way It Combines Those Gifts With A Muted, Deft Self-awareness. Most Of All, These Are Wonderfully Shaped, Powerful, And Surprising Poems-a Startling Debut.

Many Researchers Say The Dominant Emotion Experienced After Loss Is Yearning Or Searching. And While You Might Feel More Anger Early On, It's Accompanied By A Whole Host Of Other Feelings.

I Was Not Raised With Religion, And I Had No Faith Before My Mother Died. On The Other Hand, When She Died, I Did Not Immediately Feel She Was "gone." I Don't Believe She Is In Something Like Heaven, But I Also Feel That We Don't Understand Much About The Nature Of The Universe. So I Hold On To That Uncertainty, At Times.

I'm Not Much Like My Mother; That Role Falls To My Brothers, Who Have More Of Her Blithe And Freewheeling Spirit.

'hamlet' Is The Best Description Of Grief I've Read Because It Dramatizes Grief Rather Than Merely Describing It.

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.

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.

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.

Falling In Love

I Am The Indoctrinated Child Of Two Lapsed Irish Catholics. Which Is To Say: I Am Not Religious.

What Had Happened Still Seemed Implausible. A Person Was Present Your Entire Life, And Then One Day She Disappeared And Never Came Back. It Resisted Belief.

There Are Many Kinds Of Loss Embedded In A Loss - The Loss Of The Person, And The Loss Of The Self You Got To Be With That Person. And The Seeming Loss Of The Past, Which Now Feels Forever Out Of Reach.

We Have An Idea - A Very Modern Idea - That Dying Is Undignified. But I Think This Is Because We Have The Illusion That We Can Control Our Bodies And Our Fates.

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.

One Of The Difficulties With Grief Research Is That It Risks Making Certain Kinds Of Grief Seem Normal And Others Abnormal - And Of Course Having A Sense Of The Contours Of Grief Is, I Think, Truly Useful, One Has To Remember It's Not A Science, It's An Individual Reckoning, Which Science Is Just Trying To Help Us Describe.

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.

Suddenly It Was Fall, The Season Of Death, The Anniversary Of Things-going-to-hell.

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.

My Whole Life, I Had Been Taught To Read And Study, To Seek Understanding In Knowledge Of History, Of Cultures.

One Of The Ideas I've Clung To Most Of My Life Is That If I Just Try Hard Enough It Will Work Out.

A Mother Is Beyond Any Notion Of A Beginning. That's What Makes Her A Mother.

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.

What's Endlessly Complicated In Thinking About Women's Gymnastics Is The Way That Vulnerability And Power Are Threaded Through The Sport.

A Mother Is A Story With No Beginning. That Is What Defines Her.

Sometimes You Don't Even Know What You Want Until You Find Out You Can't Have It.

It's A Blessing Not To Be Alone In Your Grief But It's Also Painful To See Your Parents And Siblings In Pain.

There Is Always Tension In Women's Gymnastics Between Athleticism, Grace, Performance, And Eros.

My Mother Never Liked Mother's Day. She Thought It Was A Fake Holiday Dreamed Up By Hallmark To Commodify Deep Sentiments That Couldn't Be Expressed With A Card.

'hamlet' Is A Play About A Man Whose Grief Is Deemed Unseemly.

A Mother Is The Portal By Which You Enter The World.

Be Patient With Yourself. Don't Make The Loss Harder By Thinking You Should Be A Certain Way, Or Have Bounced Back, Etc.

I Think That Grief Is A Profound Spiritual, Metaphysical, And - Oddly - Physical Reckoning With Death, Which We Don't Understand Well. It's Both The Process By Which You Relearn The World In The Absence Of Someone Who Was A Pillar In It, And The Process In Which You Confront The Reality Of Death.

The People We Most Love Do Become A Physical Part Of Us, Ingrained In Our Synapses, In The Pathways Where Memories Are Created.

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 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.

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.

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.

I Have Seen That Grief Can Be Very Different For Different People. While The Range Of Emotions Experienced Is Similar, The Way We Deal With Those Emotions Isn't, Necessarily.

Faith Does Help Mourners Survive Their Loss, Some Studies Suggest; But I Imagine One Still Struggles.

Writing Has Always Been The Primary Way I Make Sense Of The World.

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