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.

Meghan O'Rourke

Allowed Also Bruised Deepest Descend Face Fathom Feel Grief Mourn Over Quite Somehow Strangeness Taboo Wonder Would Written You Your

Related Quotes

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.

— Meghan O'Rourke

Many Americans don't mourn in public anymore - we don't wear black, we don't beat our chests and wail.

— Meghan O'Rourke

AmericanAnymoreBeat

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

— Meghan O'Rourke

ConditionGriefNearly

Grief is at once a public and a private experience. One's inner, inexpressible disruption cannot be fully realized in one's public persona.

— Meghan O'Rourke

CannotDisruptionExperience

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.

— Meghan O'Rourke

BadBringingChange