Meghan o rourke

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.

I am the indoctrinated child of two lapsed Irish Catholics. Which is to say: I am not religious.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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