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 dr…

- Meghan O'Rourke

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.

- Meghan O'Rourke

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 …

- Meghan O'Rourke

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.

- Meghan O'Rourke

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.

- Meghan O'Rourke

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

- Meghan O'Rourke

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 w…

- Meghan O'Rourke

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 no…

- 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.

- Meghan O'Rourke