Quotes by Meghan O'Rourke

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.

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.

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.

One of the grubby truths about a loss is that you dont 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.

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

If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.

Sometimes you dont even know what you want until you find out you cant have it.

My mother died of metastatic colorectal cancer shortly before three P.M. on Christmas Day of 2008. I dont know the exact time of her death, because none of us thought to look at a clock for a while after she stopped breathing.

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 grubby truths about a loss is that you dont 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 most.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”