Meghan O'Rourke Quotes

[after the death of a loved one] It is when there is nothing more to be done that the reality of the loss often hits with full force.

Losing a wife can be very hard. In my case, it was almost impossible.

Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted colour off ... Do not for ever with thy vailed lids Seek for thy noble father in the dust.

There should be a statute of limitation on grief. A rulebook that says it is all right to wake up crying, but only for a month. That after 42 days you will no longer turn with your heart racing, certain you have heard her call out your name. That there will be no fine imposed if you feel the need to clean out her desk; take down her artwork from the refrigerator; turn over a school portrait as you pass - if only because it cuts you fresh again to see it. That it's okay to measure the time she has been gone, the way we once measured her birthdays.

There was a lot they didn’t tell you about death, she had discovered, and one of the biggies was how long it took the ones you loved most to die in your heart.

I have to say that since my mother died, I am not the same person anymore. My life has changed a great deal because it's really unbearable to think you can't see her anymore or talk to her anymore.

L'ide e qu'on mourra est plus cruelle que mourir, mais moins que l'ide e qu'un autre est mort. The idea of dying is worse than dying itself, but less cruel than the idea that another has died.

Is not absence death to those who love?

I don't know what it is about death that makes it so hard. I suppose it's the one-sided communication; the fact that we never get to ask our loved one if she suffered, if she is happy wherever she is now...if she is somewhere. It's the question mark that comes with death that we can't face, not the period.

When a person you love dies, it doesn’t feel real. It’s like it’s happening to someone else. It’s someone else’s life. I’ve never been good with the abstract. What does it mean when someone is really truly gone?

When someone dies, it is like when your house burns down; it isn't for years that you realize the full extent of your loss.

When you're young, the loss that you experience when you break up with somebody, that's the loss of a relationship. And the older you get, you actually lose people to death and you lose those relationships, too.

When you lose someone you love, you die too, and you wait around for your body to catch up.

Bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.

Death ends a life, but it does not end a relationship, which struggles on in the survivor's mind toward some resolution which it may never find.

The tragedy of loss is not that we grieve, but that we cease to grieve, and then perhaps the dead are dead at last.

This is what you should know about losing someone you love. They do not travel alone. You go with them.

A sea of red lights, and I slow down. My job now is to gather everyone together and tell them we have to let her go. I won't tell anyone over the phone, because I didn't like hearing the news from the doctor that way. I have maybe a week to handle the arrangements, as the doctor said, but the arrangements are overwhelming. How do I learn how to run a family? How do I say goodbye to someone I love so much that I've forgotten just how much I love her?

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.

I lost my brother when he was 30, and that was devastating for me. I don't know if I will ever get over it.

When my mother passed away I was 20.

I hope I am not too repetitive. However, coming to terms with death is part of the general human situation.

Obviously, at this age, I've lost people in my life. But with a parent, it's just different. I was very attached to my father and had this naive little-girl notion that he'd always be around. So I'm finding acceptance of my father's death is the hardest thing to accept.

There's something about losing friends, particularly young people, where it's not something that you get over. I don't believe there's a healing process.

I lost my dad when I was younger, and I know what it's like to lose a beloved parent.