Meghan O'Rourke Mother Quotations

I was not raised with religion, and I had no faith before my mother died. On the other hand, when she died, I did not immediately feel she was "gone." I don't believe she is in something like heaven, but I also feel that we don't understand much about the nature of the universe. So I hold on to that uncertainty, at times.

Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me.

Like my mother before me, I have always been a good speller.

I'm not much like my mother; that role falls to my brothers, who have more of her blithe and freewheeling spirit.

A mother is the portal by which you enter the world.

My mother died of metastatic colorectal cancer shortly before three P.M. on Christmas Day of 2008. I don't know the exact time of her death, because none of us thought to look at a clock for a while after she stopped breathing.

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

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

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

My mother died of metastatic colorectal cancer shortly before three P.M. on Christmas Day of 2008. I don't know the exact time of her death, because none of us thought to look at a clock for a while after she stopped breathing.

My mother never liked Mother's Day. She thought it was a fake holiday dreamed up by Hallmark to commodify deep sentiments that couldn't be expressed with a card.

When my mother was sick, I found myself needing to put down in my journals all sorts of things - to try to understand them, and, I think, to try to remember them.

The truth is, I need to experience my mother's presence in the world around me and not just in my head.

A mother is a story with no beginning. That is what defines her.

A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without sky: unimaginable.

I think about my mother every day. But usually the thoughts are fleeting - she crosses my mind like a spring cardinal that flies past the edge of your eye: startling, luminous, lovely... gone.

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.