My mother died of metastatic colorectal cancer shortly before three P. M. on Christmas Day of 2008. I … - Meghan O'Rourke

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All the science in the last few years, or almost all of it, really serves to show that the [climate] effects are larger and more rapid than we had thought even a decade ago.

Meghan O'Rourke

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.

Breathing, Cancer, Look, Mother, Three, Time

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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.

Grief, Linear, Sadness, Unpredictable, Worst, Would Be

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.

Crosses, Eye, Gone, Mother, Spring

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.

Half, Home, Mother, Word, Year, Years

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.

Believe, Hands, Heaven, Mother, Nature, Understand

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.

Dog, Food, Grief, Inner, Memories