Meghan O'Rourke

There is always tension in women's gymnastics between athleticism, grace, performance, and eros.

It's all too easy when talking about female gymnasts to fall into the trap of infantilizing them, spending more time worrying more about female vulnerability than we do celebrating female strength.

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.

My whole life, I had been taught to read and study, to seek understanding in knowledge of history, of cultures.

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

My theory is this: Women falter when they're called on to be highly self-conscious about their talents. Not when they're called on to enact them.

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.

All love stories are tales of beginnings. When we talk about falling in love, we go to the beginning, to pinpoint the moment of freefall.

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

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.

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